This Dokument contains special considerations that apply when you are using asynchronous Natural under CICS.

The following topics are covered:

• Asynchronous Natural Processing

• Asynchronous Natural Sessions under CICS

• Testing and Debugging

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Asynchronous Natural Processing

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.

Asynchronous Natural Sessions under CICS

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 TTYPE or the terminal command %T= set to ASYL or other.

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.

Note that some parameter settings for asynchronous Natural sessions can be forced by setting the NTCICSP macro parameter RCVASYN to ON.

Testing and Debugging

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.