Configuring CICS® Transaction Gateway messages in tests

After you define CICS® physical and logical resources and bind them to an environment, you must create a test for an operation that is bound to a logical CICS® server. Then you can configure CICS® Transaction Gateway messages.

About this task

In CICS®, you can group multiple program executions into a single Logical Unit of Work (LUW) that is committed as a transactional, or atomic, operation. All executions (and their side effects) succeed or fail. For information about how LUW works, see Transactions in CICS®.

HCL DevOps Test Integrations and APIs (Test Integrations and APIs) supports this functionality with fields in the Send Request message window for an LUW control flag and ID that can be passed as part of a Send Request messaging operation over a CICS® Transaction Gateway Transport.

In the Send Request window, there are specific message fields for CICS® Transaction Gateway, which are described here. For detailed instructions about defining messages, refer to API Tester Reference.

To join two Request/Reply operations together as a single LUW, set the first interaction to use LUW Control: Extended, and store the resulting LUW token from the header in a tag. For the second Request/Reply operation, set the interaction to use LUW Control Commit and populate the ID with the tag from the first interaction. To have more than two operations in an LUW, use the same tagged value in the intermediate interactions, by using LUW Control: Extended.

To roll back all the work that is done under that LUW, use the Backout option that specifes an LUW ID.

To configure CICS® Transaction Gateway Send messages:

Procedure

  1. In the Test Factory, open a CICS TG test and double-click the send request. The send request opens.
  2. Click Browse to select the CICS® transport to use for sending messages. In the Formatter list, CICS® is selected.
  3. In the Program field, type the name of the program to be run on the CICS® system.
  4. In the Transaction Name field, type the name of the CICS® Transaction Gateway transaction.
  5. Select the Use as TPN check box to use the transaction name from previous step as the Transaction Program Name (TPN).
  6. Using the LUW Control list, select the LUW control to use. The options are None, Extended, Commit, or Backout.
  7. In the Response Data Length field, type the number of characters that are allowed for response data.
  8. Select the Trim Response check box to limit the length of the response.
  9. Click Ok to save the Send message formatting.