How to see what has triggered a CICS transaction?

Customer Information Control System. Middleware and MQ Series.
Post Reply
durga
Registered Member
Posts: 53
Joined: Mon Jul 01, 2013 3:28 pm

How to see what has triggered a CICS transaction?

Post by durga »

Hi,

How to see what has triggered a CICS transaction? I have a COBOL CICS program, the comment section of this is not giving any information about how the program is triggered. How do we identify the calling program in CICS?

And is there a possibility to see the calling sequence of programs?
User avatar
Robert Sample
Global Moderator
Global Moderator
Posts: 1886
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 1:22 am
Location: Dubuque Iowa
United States of America

Re: How to see what has triggered a CICS transaction?

Post by Robert Sample »

There are at least six ways to initiate a CICS transaction:
1. transaction id keyed into terminal (that is, the top left 4 characters on screen)
2. EXEC CICS RETURN with transaction specified
3. EXEC CICS START with transaction specified
4. attention identifier associated with transaction
5. automatic task initiation for a TD queue
6. program list table entry
So there may -- or may not -- be a calling program; a TD queue trigger, for example, would directly invoke the program / transaction with no calling program. Only options 2 and 3 actually have a calling program, in fact.

There are no easy ways to see the calling sequence of programs. If you have the time, and the access, you could walk through the programs with CEDF to identify the sequence of CICS programs. However, if a COBOL program does a CALL to another COBOL (or assembler) program, that would not be captured in CEDF since there is no CICS event to trigger CEDF.
durga
Registered Member
Posts: 53
Joined: Mon Jul 01, 2013 3:28 pm

Re: How to see what has triggered a CICS transaction?

Post by durga »

Robert Sample wrote: Thu Nov 09, 2017 8:30 pmThere are at least six ways to initiate a CICS transaction:
1. transaction id keyed into terminal (that is, the top left 4 characters on screen)
2. EXEC CICS RETURN with transaction specified
3. EXEC CICS START with transaction specified
4. attention identifier associated with transaction
5. automatic task initiation for a TD queue
6. program list table entry
So there may -- or may not -- be a calling program; a TD queue trigger, for example, would directly invoke the program / transaction with no calling program. Only options 2 and 3 actually have a calling program, in fact.

There are no easy ways to see the calling sequence of programs. If you have the time, and the access, you could walk through the programs with CEDF to identify the sequence of CICS programs. However, if a COBOL program does a CALL to another COBOL (or assembler) program, that would not be captured in CEDF since there is no CICS event to trigger CEDF.
Thank you so much. I did not know all of them.
Post Reply

Create an account or sign in to join the discussion

You need to be a member in order to post a reply

Create an account

Not a member? register to join our community
Members can start their own topics & subscribe to topics
It’s free and only takes a minute

Register

Sign in

Return to “CICS, Middleware and MQ Series.”