Terminology

The following terms are sometimes used without further explanation in the remaining sections of this topic:

Principal facility
This term means the terminal or session that is associated with your transaction when the transaction is initiated. CICS® commands, such as SEND or RECEIVE, that do not explicitly name a facility, are taken to refer to the principal facility. Only one principal facility can be owned by a transaction.
Alternate facility
In distributed transaction processing, a transaction can acquire the use of a session to a remote system. This session is called an alternate facility. It must be named explicitly on CICS commands that refer to it. A transaction can own more than one alternate facility.

Other intersystem sessions, such as those used for function shipping, are not owned by the transaction, and are not regarded as alternate facilities of the transaction.

Front-end and back-end transactions
In distributed transaction processing, a pair of transactions converse with one another. The front-end transaction is initiated first, acquires a session to the remote system, and causes the back-end transaction to be initiated.

Note that a transaction can at the same time be the back-end transaction on one conversation and the front-end transaction on one or more other conversations.

Related concepts
Problem determination
Related tasks
Application programming for CICS function shipping
Application programming for CICS DPL
Application programming for asynchronous processing
Application programming for CICS transaction routing
CICS-to-IMS applications
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