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 the 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 a transaction CEDX which enables tracing of asynchronous tasks in CICS. In earlier CICS versions, this functionality did not exist, that is, such debugging was only possible with terminal-bound tasks.
The Natural CICS Interface offers some assistance in this case: You can
test asynchronous Natural sessions by starting that session from a terminal,
but either with ASYN, as the very first five characters in the
dynamic parameter string, or with the profile parameter
TTYPE=xxxx,
where xxxx is ASYN or
ASYL. The Natural CICS Interface then sets up an asynchronous
Natural session.
Please, note that this emulation is only 100 percent in terms of Natural; CICS keeps on treating the task as terminal bound.