Multiple versions of a resource definition

As your business applications progress from development through testing and into production, the resources that support them may evolve as well. Since resources that are defined to CICSPlex® SM exist independent of groups or other objects, versioning is necessary to support variations in resource definitions. This version support enables you to manage:

For example, you can have three DB2TDEF definitions, each called DB2TR01, and each specifying a different (or the same) transaction IDs, each having a different version number.

Business Application Services can manage up to 15 versions of the same resource definition, each specifying the same or a different CICS® resource.

When you create a resource definition, you can specify a version number for the definition. The version number is an integer in the range 1 through 15. If you leave the Version field blank, or if you specify 0 for the version number, then it is automatically assigned the first available version number.

The version number is assigned to the resource definition when the definition is stored in the CICSPlex SM data repository.

CICSPlex SM ensures that the version number is unique for the resource type of the definition.

Notes:
  1. CICSPlex SM does not generate a new version when you update an existing resource definition.
  2. As with the name field of the resource definition, the version field cannot be changed while browsing or updating a resource definition in a view. Furthermore, when creating a new resource definition, the version field, (also like the name field) can be entered on the input panel only of the create view.
  3. When you create resource definitions using the batched repository-update facility, ot the application programming interface (API), you can use the DEFVER keyword to specify the version number of a new definition.

  4. CICSPlex SM does not allow multiple versions of the same resource definition to be installed in a CICS system.

You can use version numbers to help identify a specific variant of a resource definition, providing you have a policy of using version numbers for that purpose. Otherwise, if you remove certain versions of a resource definition and then define new ones, the version number alone may not indicate the most recent version.

For example, suppose you define 15 versions of a resource definition (numbered 1 to 15) and then remove versions 3 and 12. The next time you create a new version of that resource definition, if you do not specify a version number, CICSPlex SM reuses the available version numbers from low to high. So, in this example, the latest version of the resource definition might actually be version 3.

For this reason, the version number alone might not be sufficient to identify the latest version of a resource definition. To enable you to do that, CICSPlex SM performs time-stamping, which provides a chronological record of the versions of a resource definition. The date and time at which a given version of a resource definition was created and last updated are maintained by CICSPlex SM in the CREATETIME and CHANGETIME attributes of the appropriate resource table. These values, are recorded using the time zone of the maintenance point CMAS, not the user who created or changed the definition. In addition, the values are fixed at the time they are recorded; they are not affected by any subsequent changes to the time zone of the maintenance point CMAS.

If you do not explicitly use the version number to identify particular versions, and you want to identify the last version created, you can either:

Related concepts
Using the end user interface to define CICS resources
Common EUI resource definition actions
Common EUI definition fields
Availability for CICS releases
Creation of resource definitions
Maintenance of resource definitions
Links between CICS systems
Resource definition validation
Management of CICS resources using CICSPlex SM
Installation of CICS resources
[[ Contents Previous Page | Next Page Index ]]