Formatting input and output messages for IMS™ transaction manager.
When developing an application that uses the IMS TM resource adapter, there are message
formatting issues that must be considered:
- The Java™ application is running on a different platform
(for example, Windows®, AIX®, and Sun Solaris) than the EIS platform
(in the case of IMS TM,
it is an IMS application
program on MVS™ or z/OS®)
Remember
that the text data in your messages will have to be converted between text
data in UNICODE at the client end and text data in EBCDIC used by your IMS application.
- The Endian value for the platform where your target host applications
runs, and the code page used by your host system where IMS is running (the default is US English
(037)
The easiest way to handle issues related to this is to allow the IDE
to deal with them for you. For example, Rational® Application Developer (RAD)
will create Java data bindings from imported C, COBOL, and PL/I
data structures which will do all the format conversion for your messages
at runtime. These data bindings are created based on the options you select
in the importer wizard.
- Special cases include variable length messages, multiple segment messages,
and messages containing arrays. Guidance concerning how to deal with these
special cases and more can be found in the RAD Samples Gallery and Tutorial
Gallery under the following headings:
- RAD Samples Gallery > Technology samples > Java > J2C Java Bean
- RAD Tutorials Gallery > Do and Learn
Java bindings
format your input and output messages. An alternative to using the IDE to
create Java data bindings is to create them yourself and follow
the J2EE Connector Architecture specification.