In principle, the modeled application determines the form in which element information is exchanged with ISPF tool. See Special properties for more information.
The operation that a tool should execute, such as READ, UPDATE, INSERT, INSERT-CHILD, DELETE, COPY, or MOVE can be explicitly defined in the AWM model. For cases in which the specific tool operation cannot be modeled in advance, the tool can dynamically define the operation and report back to the client application (operation: TOOL-DEFINED).
In addition, there are specially modeled tools that expect the resource lists as output.
In the following topics, the different types of operations are described in terms of the impact on the programming of the tool adapter.