There is not much difference between the ISPF Edit session and the ISPF View session. In fact the only difference apart from a different apperance in standard colours, is the lacking possibility of saving the changes in the View session. At least it is meant to be so.

I think most of us have tried to make changes in a View session beleiving we were in the Edit session. Then luckily there is an easy way out of the mess. You can use the REPLACE primary command, which is active during the View session. Before activating the REPLACE command you must tell which lines in the session you want to copy from your View session. Simply type C99999 as a line command on the first line. This will effectively mark all lines unless you have more than 99999 lines in your View session.

Now you can type REPLACE followed by a member name, if you are viewing a member. In fact you can type the name of the member you are viewing and when you hit Enter, it will be replaced, just as if you had made a SAVE command in an Edit session. If you are viewing a dataset, you have to type only REPLACE and hit Enter. Now a panel appears where you can type in the name of the dataset, you want to replace. In most installations this panel has a default dataset name being the name of the dataset you are viewing. So in this case all you have to do is to hit Enter.

It would all have been a lot easier, if we had selected the Edit session in the beginning. Considering the situation it is fairly simple to save the changes made in a View session, especially now where you know what to do.