Operating interfaces - IBM - AS/400

Operator interaction with CICS/400 is through either CICS-supplied transactions or OS/400 commands. This section describes some of the CICS/400 and OS/400 facilities available to enable you to communicate with your CICS/400 system.

1. OS/400 CL commands
   

   CL commands are available for a number of operating tasks. It has already been mentioned that there are CL commands for defining and working with resources.CL commands are also available for starting and ending a control region, starting and ending shells, compiling programs, formatting and printing trace data,and many others. These commands have a format that will be familiar to you as an OS/400 user and display prompt screens that look like native OS/400 screens.

2. Signing on
   

   CICS/400 does not have its own sign on procedures. All users must first sign on to the OS/400.

3. Starting a transaction
   

   Transactions are usually started by entering a transaction identifier of up to four characters on an interactive shell display. CICS initiates the associated program object by referring to the resource definition program control table.

   There are many other ways of starting a transaction. For example, the shell startup procedure and a transaction identifier can be included in a user’s profile, or you can enter a transaction identifier with the shell start command, or the applications that a user can run could be presented on a menu. Transactions may also be started by automatic transaction initiation (ATI) or by intersystem communication requests.

4. CICS-supplied transactions
   

   CICS/400 includes a number of supplied transactions that help you to run and administer your system. The resource definition transaction CEDA is introduced in “Resource management”, and the development transactions CECI, CEBR, and CEDF are introduced in “Application development”. In addition to these, there are the following transactions that are supplied as a standard part of every CICS/400 system:

   The master terminal transaction CEMT
   The master terminal transaction CEMT allows you to control the system and its resources. You use CEMT while CICS/400 is running, so you can change and adjust the system, or correct a problem, without taking down your CICS/400 system.With CEMT, you can:

   • Control the number of tasks, or the number of certain types of tasks, that are running at any given time
   • Purge a particular task from the system
   • Enable or disable a particular transaction
   • Enable or disable a file - Start and stop tracing
   • Install a newly compiled copy of an application program
   • End a control region
   • Perform a CICS/400 dump

   CEMT is a powerful tool and its use can significantly affect your system and its users. You should ensure that you give this transaction adequate security protection in a production system.

   • The routing transaction CRTE.

   The routing transaction CRTE provides one way of running a transaction that is defined to another control region, either on the same CICS system or on a remote CICS system. The remote system may be on the same or another iSeries platform, or on a different platform.

   • The sign-off transaction CESF

   The sign-off transaction CESF is used to shut down a shell from within CICS/400. In addition, there is a suite of supplied internal-transactions for supporting intersystem communication and CICS clients.

5. Messages

CICS/400 messages are displayed on the job logs of CICS/400 jobs, in 5250 terminal job logs, on the QSYSOPR system operator queue, or in a special transient data queue called CSMT. Completed job logs can be viewed in the OS/400 spooler, using the WRKSPLF command.

6. Online help

Online help is available for all fields on the resource definition panels, as you would expect for an OS/400 system. The online help is invoked in the same way as for any OS/400 system. Context-sensitive help is available also for each CICS/400 message.

7. National Language Support

CICS/400 is enabled for full National Language Support (NLS).