This document contains special considerations that apply when you are using asynchronous Natural under CICS.
The following topics are covered:
Asynchronous Natural processing is generally discussed in the section Asynchronous Processing in the Operations documentation; however, some additional considerations apply when running under CICS. These are described in the following sections.
Make sure that appropriate SENDER and OUTDEST destinations are specified for an
asynchronous Natural session; otherwise, any output (for example, unexpected error
messages) will lead to an abnormal termination.
Also, make sure that a suitable message switching transaction ID (MSGTRAN) is specified in the
NTCICSP macro of the Natural parameter module and defined in CICS.
In addition to CICS terminal IDs and transient data destinations for SENDER and OUTDEST, the following
keywords are supported by Natural CICS Interface:
DUMMY
|
Any output is ignored. |
CONSOLE
|
Any output is routed to the operator console.
When dealing with the
console, the terminal type should be switched accordingly, using the profile
parameter |
By default, the 3270 data stream protocol is used for output of an asynchronous Natural session under CICS.
It is also possible to send Natural output data without any 3270 terminal or printer
control information to, for example, a CICS message destination such as CSSL. This can be
accomplished by switching into line mode using a SET CONTROL 'T=' statement or by starting with
profile parameter TTYPE=xxxx, where
xxxx is BTCH or ASYL. All Natural
output is then sent line by line, with a leading ASA control character when the Natural
profile parameter EJ is
set to ON; with EJ=OFF, no control character is sent at all.
 |
Warning: When SET CONTROL 'T=xxxx' or SET
CONTROL '+' is used, or when personal-computer support is enabled (profile
parameter PC set to
ON), the Natural system variable *DEVICE will be modified, which means that it
can no longer be used to determine an asynchronous Natural session. |
Note that some parameter settings for asynchronous Natural sessions can be forced by
setting the NTCICSP macro parameter RCVASYN to
ON.
Recent CICS versions offer the transaction CEDX which enables debugging of asynchronous tasks in CICS. In earlier CICS versions, such debugging was only possible with terminal tasks.
If you want to test asynchronous Natural sessions without CEDX, start the asynchronous
Natural session from a terminal, and either specify ASYN as the very first
five characters in the dynamic parameter string, or specify the profile parameter
TTYPE=ASYN or TTYPE=ASYL. Natural CICS Interface then sets up
an asynchronous Natural session. Note that even though Natural handles the session as
asynchronous, CICS keeps on treating it as a terminal session.