For at least a decade or so, there is a feature available in ChangeMan ZMF (probably from around version 5.3 or so) which is more or less "hidden" in CMNEX027, with a very misleading comment in it. It appears that hardly anybody knows about that hidden feature. By turning it on, during selective promote ChangeMan ZMF will only show a subset of components that can be promoted. I.e. it will only show components that fit any of these criteria:

• Newly staged components (never promoted before).
• Restaged components (to be re-promoted again).
• Overlaid components (to be re-promoted again).

Even though it may seem just a minor (nice to have) option to be turned on via CMNEX027, it is not! Consider a huge package, with say some hundreds (or thousands?) of components. If the package was (full) promoted before, and then just 1 (of a few) component(s) got restaged, you will want to selective promote that 1 (or a few) component(s) also. Read on to understand the power of this CMNEX027 feature ...

Without the option turned on, during selective promote you will have to page down (PF08) many, many times, until you find the restaged component (and if you miss it while paging down, you've to PF07 to return again ...). However, with the option turned on, you will get a display that does not include all components that are already promoted (and not restaged or overlaid). Assuming that you only have restaged 1 component, the member list shown during selective promote contains only the restaged component (together with any other components that were newly staged, or overlaid, or restaged).

Not only is it way more easy to complete the selective promote request with this CMNEX027 feature turned on (you don't have to page down to find the component), but as an extra bonus the file tailoring of the promotion job will require less resources and get constructed much faster. This because the ISPF table containing the components to be promoted, contains only those rows as shown on the selective promote panel (instead of 1 row for each of the components, including the rows for all already promoted components).

To turn on this feature in CMNEX027, just go to the table with options for each of the promotion levels, which allow you to (eg) set the promotion rule value for each promotion level. Then change the value of "N" to "Y" for the last flag in the table, which has comment "Don't include stage orphans" behind it (what that comment actually means is not really clear, but rest assured that it's worth trying to change it to "Y" and then see what happens ...). Repeat this change from "N" to "Y" for every promotion level you'd want (why would you not want it for ALL promotion levels???). Enable the modified exit in your ChangeMan ZMF test environment and perform a selective promote, and check which members are listed now (if any). That's it, done! Your ChangeMan ZMF users, release managers, etc will loooooooooove it. Trust us!

Note: This hidden CMNEX027 feature was also mentioned (briefly) in a reply from SERENA to a question about hidden panels and/or panel options.