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.