The general format of a CICS® command is EXECUTE CICS (or EXEC CICS) followed by the name of the required command and possibly one or more options.
You can write many application programs using the CICS command-level interface without any knowledge of, or reference to, the fields in the CICS control blocks and storage areas. However, you might need to get information that is valid outside the local environment of your application program.
You can use the ADDRESS and ASSIGN commands to access such information. For programming information about these commands, see the CICS Application Programming Reference manual.
When using the ADDRESS and ASSIGN commands, various fields can be read but should not be set or used in any other way. This means that you should not use any of the CICS fields as arguments in CICS commands, because these fields may be altered by the EXEC interface modules.
The INQUIRE, SET, and PERFORM commands allow application programs to access information about CICS resources. The application program can retrieve and modify information for CICS data sets, terminals, system entries, mode names, system attributes, programs, and transactions. These commands plus the spool commands of the CICS interface to JES, are primarily for the use of the system programmer. For programming information, see the CICS System Programming Reference manual.
In addition to the usual CICS control blocks, each task in a command-level environment has a control block known as the EXEC interface block (EIB) associated with it. An application program can access all of the fields in the EIB by name. The EIB contains information that is useful during the execution of an application program, such as the transaction identifier, the time and date (initially when the task is started, and subsequently, if updated by the application program using ASKTIME), and the cursor position on a display device. The EIB also contains information that is helpful when a dump is used to debug a program. For programming information about EIB fields, see the CICS Application Programming Reference manual.
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