The affinity related functions of CICS® IA help users of CICS dynamic routing, who need to determine whether any of the transactions in their CICS applications use programming techniques that require them to be run in the same region thus creating an inter-transaction affinity, or in a particular region, thus creating a transaction-system affinity. Application programmers can use CICS IA to detect whether the programs they are developing are likely to cause transaction affinities.
The affinity-related functions of CICS IA work in a similar way to the interdependency functions, by collecting information about programs and transactions that issue specific commands, but in this case the objective is to detect affinities rather than interdependencies.
CICS IA detects possible affinities by monitoring those EXEC CICS commands that have the potential to create them. All the CICS API and SPI commands that might create affinities and can be monitored are listed in Affinity-related commands.
The Collector component of CICS IA collects the affinities that apply to a single CICS region, that is, a single application-owning region (AOR) or a single, combined, routing region and AOR. It can be run against production CICS regions and is also useful in a test environment, to monitor possible affinities introduced by new or changed application suites or packages.
The CINT transaction provides an interactive interface with which to control the Collector.
The affinity data collected by the Collector is stored in data tables in a data space. When you stop the Collector and, optionally, at predetermined intervals, the affinity data in the data space is saved to VSAM files by the CICS IA autosave transaction, CINB.
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