CICS/ESA: Fundamentals

Synopsis
CICS/ESA: Fundamentals presents general concepts and terminology essential to the new CICS user.

Audience
This course is designed for data processing and business professionals who will use CICS to write CICS programs or who will manage CICS projects.

Time
4 - 7 hours

Product Code: CIC110

After completing this course, the student should be able to:

Describe the advantages of using CICS to develop online applications

Compare batch and online processing

Describe how multi-tasking allows CICS to provide fast responses to requests

Describe the functions of CICS's major components

Use several CICS-supplied transactions

Explain the programming techniques used to develop a reentrant program

Describe the conversational programming techniques used for online applications

Identify the support facilities which CICS provides for defining resources

Overview
Provides a general description of CICS and its basic concepts.

Online Processing
General Description of CICS.  Comparisons of online processing and batch processing.

Multi-Processing Concepts
What makes up a transaction.  How CICS handles many transactions.

What Is CICS?
Covers the capabilities of CICS and how they are used in the development process.

The CICS Structure
How CICS is organized.  Functions CICS uses to manage transactions.

The API
Languages supported by CICS. Commands used to access data sets and databases.  Commands to transfer control.

Special Facilities
How CICS and time-sharing systems like TSO, Roscoe and CMS complement each other.  List of built-in transactions. How to sign on and sign off.

Transaction Processing
Discusses how CICS processes a transaction and presents recommended programming techniques.

Conversational Techniques
The differences between conversational and pseudo-conversational programming techniques.

Reentrant Programs
What makes a program reentrant.  CICS processing method.

Resource Definitions
Discusses using CICS-supplied transactions that view and define resources.

Master Terminal Program
Capabilities of the Master Terminal program (CEMT).  How to view the status of system resources.

Defining Resources
Resources used by CICS.  How resources are defined online.

Using CEDA
Operations the CEDA transaction provides.  How to use the CEDA display.  How to create program and file definitions.