Appendix C. Useful tips when analyzing Transaction Affinities Utility reports

Sometimes the report produced by the Reporter from data gathered from the Detector can contain some results that appear odd at ®rst glance. This appendix gives tips for resolving such results.

COBOL affinities

If an application program is invoked using the native CALL statement, CICS COBOL run-time code issues an EXEC CICS LOAD HOLD for the program and branches to it directly. This causes affinity only if the program is not reentrant; that is, if it modi®es itself. Otherwise, there is no affinity.

CICS COBOL run-time code writes data to a TS queue if an abnormal termination occurs. The TS queue name used is ªCEBRº plus the termid of the terminal, or blanks if there is no terminal. This does not cause affinity.

LOGON or SYSTEM when PCONV expected

When dealing with an application that is known to use TS queues within a pseudoconversation, but never beyond, there may be occurrences in the report of affinity groups that appear as LUNAME/SYSTEM or LUNAME/LOGON, instead of the expected LUNAME/PCONV.

vA SYSTEM lifetime can be explained if the installation uses a session manager that logs users off after a pre-determined quiet time. When the log off occurs in the middle of a pseudoconversation, the Transaction Affinities Utility notices that the TS queue still exists, and increases the lifetime to SYSTEM.

vA LOGON lifetime can be explained by the user switching off the terminal in the middle of a pseudoconversation and causing a VTAM® line error. This causes an error transaction to be attached internally at the terminal. The affinity utility program notices that the TS queue exists at the end of that transaction, and increases the lifetime to LOGON.

In both these circumstances the real lifetime is PCONV, because, although the TS queue exists at the end of the pseudoconversation, the data in it will never be used again. Normally the ®rst action of a new pseudoconversation is to delete the contents of all such TS queues for that terminal to ensure that everything is tidy.

Unrecognized Transids

Transids that consist of garbage data are reported in the Transaction Affinities Utility report. Such transids are not known to CICS, and most contain the same hexadecimal data. This is probably caused by a bug in an application that causes the EIB to be overwritten.

© Copyright IBM Corp. 1994, 1999

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OS specifications

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