CICS® Transaction
Gateway includes enhancements in the areas of high availability, monitoring,
open integration, security, and user information.
Functional enhancements
- As an aid to migrating from EXCI to IPIC, an ECI
timeout value can be set on IPIC server definitions in the CICS Transaction Gateway configuration
file. This enables applications, that do not specify a timeout value,
to be timed out when connected to CICS over
IPIC. For more information, see ECI
timeout.
- All ECI V2 and ESI V2 functions can now be used by 64-bit applications
as well as by 32-bit applications. For more information, see CICS TG ECI and ESI Version 2 for
C Overview.
- ECI V2 applications now allow multiple threads to share a single
Gateway connection when using synchronous calls.
- ECI V2 has been enhanced with the addition of asynchronous call
support, for more information, see Making
ECI V2 and ESI V2 calls from C programs.
- Local mode JEE and Java™ applications
can now set the maximum number of send sessions that are used with
IPIC connections to CICS. The
number of send sessions controls the number of simultaneous requests
that are allowed over the connection. For more
information see, Configuring
IPIC in local mode.
High availability and scalability
- CICS Transaction
Gateway can now operate as a 31-bit or 64-bit address space. With
a 64-bit address space, the Gateway daemon can process workloads with
larger channels and can use more connection manager and worker threads
without exhausting address space resources. For
more information, see, Benefits
of using a 64-bit Gateway.
- When using the CICS request
exit, the restrictions on the routing of XA transactions have been
removed. Similar to SYNCONRETURN and extended LUW transactions, XA
transactions can now be routed based on Transid, Program, and PayloadType
values, for example. For more information, see Writing a CICS request
exit.
- Client application IP addresses are now available for use in CICS request exits. The IP address
information can be used in your CICS request
exit routing decisions, for example. For more
information about CICS request
exits, see Writing a CICS request
exit.
Monitoring
- You can use Cross Component Trace (XCT) to track individual requests
as they flow from WebSphere® Application
Server to CICS and back, making
it easier to identify the responsible component when failures occur.
XCT can be enabled for applications using the ECI resource adapter
in WebSphere Application
Server V8.5 or later. For more information,
see Transaction tracking
with Cross Component Trace (XCT).
- Request monitoring exits in the Gateway daemon have been extended
to include an exit that reports the actual target CICS server for a request. A new exit point,
RequestDetails, is called after any DSS routing decisions have been
made but before the request is sent to CICS.
For more information, see .
- Channel and container information is now available to Java request monitoring exits for ECI requests
that have an associated channel. For more information, see Data available
by FlowType and RequestEvent.
- The CTGSMFRD sample has been updated so that it
can read and format combinations of SMF records that have been generated
by any release of CICS Transaction
Gateway from V7.1 or later. For more information, see SMF viewer sample program.
- Assembler DSECTs for the CICS TG SMF111 records have been provided, in
library SCTGMAC, to simplify the use of SMF monitoring records by
assembler programs. For more information, see SMF records.
- The Gateway daemon start time is now output in
SMF records, you can use this to help identify a specific Gateway
daemon instance from the SMF data. For
more information, see Recording statistics to SMF.
Globalization
- CICS Transaction Gateway
has been updated to support right-to-left bidirectional (bidi) data
in containers. For more information see Bidirectional data support.
For other changes from previous releases see the
Upgrading section.