CICS® trace is a debugging aid for application programmers, system programmers, and IBM® field engineers. It produces trace entries in response to trace commands. The trace entries can be sent to any trace destination that is currently active. The destinations are:
For information about trace destinations, see the CICS Problem Determination Guide.
You can:
The points at which trace entries are produced during CICS operation are of four types: system trace entry points, user trace entry points, exception trace entry points, and user exception trace entry points. See the CICS Problem Determination Guide for more information about tracing.
These are points within CICS at which trace control requests are made. The most important system trace entry points for application programmers are for the EXEC interface program. These produce entries in the trace table whenever a CICS command is processed.
Two trace entries are made: the first when the command is issued, and the second when CICS has performed the required function and is about to return control to your application program. Between them, these two trace entries allow you to trace the flow of control through an application, and to check which exception conditions, if any, occurred during its execution. The ABEND, RETURN, TRACEFLAG, and XCTL commands produce single entries only.
These are additional points within your application program that you can include in the trace table to allow complete program debugging. For example, you could specify an entry for a program loop containing a counter value showing the number of times that the loop had been entered.
A trace entry is produced wherever the ENTER TRACENUM command is run. Each trace entry request, which can be given a unique identifier, causes data to be placed in the trace table.
These are additional points where CICS has detected an exception condition. These are made from specific points in the CICS code, and data is taken from areas that might provide some information about the cause. Exception trace entry points do not have an associated "level" attribute; trace calls are only ever made from them when exception conditions occur.
These are trace entries that are always written to the internal trace table (even if internal tracing is set off), but are written to other destinations only if they are active. You can identify them by the character string *EXCU in any formatted trace output produced by the CICS utility programs. See the CICS Problem Determination Guide for general information about user exception trace entry points; programming information is in the CICS Customization Guide.
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