This document covers the following topics:
See the following topics in Installation on Mainframes:
Prerequisites for information on software requirements for Natural Business Services and Natural Construct on mainframe platforms.
Operating Environments for information on the operating environments for Natural Business Services and Natural Construct on mainframe platforms.
This section contains important information you should read before installing this version of Natural Business Services. The following topics are covered:
The Visual Studio, Natural for Windows, and stand-alone Eclipse clients (plug-ins and add-ons) are no longer supported in this version of Natural Business Services. The only supported client is NaturalONE, which uses the RPC server method of calling business services. It is strongly recommended that you migrate to this client for future development. For further information, see the sections Business Services and Code Generation in the NaturalONE documentation.
Note:
Although you can continue to use existing generated/created
applications against the DISPATCH server, you will not be able to maintain
these applications using a Version 8.2 server installation.
The CDRANGE subprogram, which is used by generated object-browse subprograms to calculate the minimum and maximum values for queries that contain a range, is now obsolete and has been replaced by the CDRANGE2 subprogram. CDRANGE2 is identical to CDRANGE, except it can handle longer lengths in the key fields. Both CDRANGE and CDRANGE2 will be shipped with Natural Construct Version 5.3 and Version 8.2, which will allow existing applications and object-browse subprograms generated in Natural Construct Version 5.3 server environments to use CDRANGE and object-browse subprograms generated in NaturalONE Version 8.2 and Natural Construct Version 8.2 server environments to use CDRANGE2.
If you previously used Natural Business Services or Natural Construct to generate code against DB2 tables that were defined with the use of the NATL option in Predict, you may have seen L@ fields generated in the views and PDAs used to represent these files. Beginning with this version, the L@ fields will no longer be included in the generated code.
When installing this version of Natural Business Services (NBS) over an existing version in mainframe environments, the INT* modules will now automatically invoke the CVSETVR utility to set the product version number. Previous versions of NBS required you to do this manually.
To support Natural field/variable sizes introduced in Natural Version 4.2, the CNUELNX subprogram has been changed to accommodate the new sizes and changes to the Natural editors. In addition, the word "Dynamic" can now be used in a length field. Further changes were made in Natural Construct Version 8.2 to support another size change. In addition, the new Object-Maint-Enhanced-Subp model has been introduced to support dynamic fields in the data PDA. This new functionality will allow longer Alpha fields to be represented in the PDA as DYNAMIC, so only relevant data will be sent across the network. For more information, see Object-Maint-Enhanced-Subp Model Now Available.
Natural Business Services Version 8.2.1 contains several error corrections. New functionality is not provided.
This section describes the new features and enhancements in Natural Construct Version 8.2.1.
The Object-Maint-Enhanced-Subp model has been included in this version of Natural Business Services to handle fields that have a varying amount of data. Using this model, the following options are now available:
Generate large fields into the object PDA as dynamic fields
Maintain large object (LO) fields by the generated subprogram
Notes: