Printing display screens

If your printing requirement is simply to copy a display screen to a printer, you have choices additional to those already described. Some of these are provided by the terminal hardware itself, and some by CICS®. Some of the CICS support also depends on hardware features, and so your options depend on the type of terminals involved and, in some cases, the way in which they are defined to CICS. See the CICS Resource Definition Guide for more detail on copying.

CICS print key

The first such option is the CICS print key (also called the local copy key). This allows a user to request a printed copy of a screen by pressing a program attention key, provided the terminal is a 3270 display or a display in 3270 compatibility mode. Print key support is optional in CICS; the system programmer decides whether to include it and what key is assigned. The default is PA1. (See the PRINT option in the CICS System Definition Guide.)

The print key copies the display screen to the first available printer among those defined as eligible. Which printers are eligible depends on the definition of the display terminal from which the request originates, as follows:

Where CICS chooses the printer explicitly, as it does in the first three cases above, the printer has to be in service and not attached to a task to be "available" for a CICS print key request. Where a control unit or subsystem makes the assignment, availability and status are determined by the subsystem. The bracket state of the device usually determines whether it is available or not.

ISSUE PRINT and ISSUE COPY

An application can initiate copying a screen to a printer as well as the user, with the ISSUE PRINT and ISSUE COPY commands. ISSUE PRINT simulates the user pressing the CICS print key, and printer eligibility and availability are the same as for CICS print key requests.

There is also a command you can use to copy a screen in a task that owns the printer, as opposed to the task that owns the terminal which is to be copied. This is the ISSUE COPY command. It copies the buffer of the terminal named in the TERMID option to the buffer of the principal facility of the issuing task. The method of copying and the initiation of printing once the copy has occurred is controlled by the "copy control character" defined in the CTLCHAR option of the ISSUE COPY command; see the IBM CICS/OS/VS 3270 Data Stream Device Guide for the bit settings in this control character. The terminal whose buffer is copied and the printer must both be 3270 logical units, and they must be on the same control unit.

Hardware print key

Some 3270 terminals also have a hardware print key. Pressing this key copies the screen to the first available and eligible printer on the same control unit as the display. This function is performed entirely by the control unit, whose configuration and terminal status information determine eligibility and availability. If no printer is available, the request fails; the user is notified by a symbol in the lower left corner of the screen and must retry the request later.

BMS screen copy

Both the CICS and hardware print keys limit screen copies to a predefined set of eligible printers, and if more than one printer is eligible, the choice depends on printer use by other tasks. For screens created as part of a BMS logical message, a more general screen copy facility is available. Users can print any such screen with the "page copy" option of the CICS-supplied transaction for displaying logical messages, CSPG. With page copy, you name the specific printer to receive the output, and it does not have to be on the same control unit as the display. CSPG is described in the CICS Supplied Transactions manual.

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