External CICS Interface

This whitepaper describes how one can make a call to the CICS program from the Batch program running within MVC using the external CICS interface (EXCI).This is important in the application where we want to pass data via a batch process to an online module within the mainframe environment. This programming interface allows a user to allocate and open sessions, or pipes (a one-way communication path between a sending process and a receiving process) to a CICS region, and to pass distributed program link (DPL) requests over them. The multi-region operation (MRO) facility of CICS’ Inter-Region Communication (IRC) facility supports these requests, and each pipe maps onto one MRO session, where the client programs.