The CICS® Web
services assistant is a set of batch utilities which can help you to transform
existing CICS applications
into Web services and to enable CICS applications to use Web services provided
by external providers. The assistant supports rapid deployment of CICS applications
for use in service providers and service requesters, with the minimum of programming
effort.
When you use the Web services assistant for CICS, you do not have to write your own
code for parsing inbound messages and for constructing outbound messages; CICS maps
data between the body of a SOAP message and the application program's data
structure.
Resource definitions are, for the most part, generated and installed automatically.
You do have to define PIPELINE resources, but you can, in many cases, use
one of the pipeline configuration files that CICS provides. These are:
- basicsoap11provider.xml
- Pipeline configuration file for a service provider using the SOAP 1.1
message handler.
- basicsoap11requester.xml
- Pipeline configuration file for a service requester using the SOAP 1.1
message handler.
The assistant can create a WSDL document from a simple language structure,
or a language structure from an existing WSDL document, and supports COBOL,
C/C++, and PL/I. It also generates information used to enable automatic runtime
conversion of the SOAP messages to containers and COMMAREAs, and vice versa.
However, the assistant cannot deal with every possibility, and there are
times when you will need to take a different approach. For example:
- You don't want to use SOAP messages
- If you prefer to use a non-SOAP protocol for your messages, you can do
so. However, your application programs will be responsible for parsing inbound
messages, and constructing outbound messages.
- You want to use SOAP messages, but don't want CICS to parse them
- For an inbound message, the assistant maps the SOAP body to an application
data structure. In some applications, you may want to parse the SOAP body
yourself.
- The CICS Web
services assistant does not support your application's data structure
- Although the CICS Web services assistant supports the most common
data types and structures, there are some which are not supported. In this
situation, you should first consider providing a program layer that maps your
application's data to a format that the assistant can support. If this is
not possible, you will need to parse the message yourself.
If you decide not to use the CICS Web services assistant, you will have
to:
- Provide your own code for parsing inbound messages, and constructing outbound
messages
- Provide your own pipeline configuration file
- Define and install your own URIMAP and PIPELINE resources
The CICS Web
services assistant comprises two utility programs:
- DFHLS2WS
- Generates a Web service binding file from a language structure. This utility
also generates a Web service description.
- DFHWS2LS
- Generates a Web service binding file from a Web service description. This
utility also generates a language structure that you can use in your application
programs.
The JCL procedures to run both programs are in the
hlq.XDFHINST library.