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Locating a channel CONTAINER for a CICS task in a dump

Question & Answer


Question

How can I locate the contents of a CICS channel CONTAINER for a task in a system dump? I'm trying to debug my application program and need to see the contents of the CONTAINER.

Answer

Here is an example of how to use IPCS (Interactive Problem Control System) and the CICS IPCS supplied verbexit DFHPDxxx (where xxx is your release level of CICS like 690 for CICS TS 5.2) to locate a specific CICS task's CONTAINER in a CICS dump.

  1. Since I didn't have an application program, I used the CICS supplied CECI transaction to issue a PUT CONTAINER(WJBCONT01) CHANNEL(WJBCHAN01) for 8192 bytes with text "WJBBEGIN" at the start and "WJBEND' at the end.. alt text

  2. I then used the CICS supplied CEMT PERFORM SNAP to obtain an SVCDUMP of the CICS TS V5.2 region.

  3. I then started the IPCS and entered command VERBEXIT DFHPD690 'PG' to format the CICS program domain control blocks.

  4. I entered a FIND command for my CICS taskid...in this case 00087, and can now see my tasks CHANNEL and CONTAINER.

  5. The CONTAINER I am interested in viewing is named WJBCONT01. I need to browse the CSCB storage address 20BB3058 to get to the 64bit address of my CONTAINER contents. alt text

  6. If I enter PF3 to get out of the IPCS DFHPD690 verbexit and then go to IPCS Option 1 to browse storage and input the CSCB storage address (20BB3058 in this example).

  7. If I position my cursor at offset x'18' into the CSCB storage address (20BB3058) and key a "!" exclamation point before the 64bit storage address (00000048_40D01004 in this example), IPCS will display the storage at that address. alt text

  8. I can see the contents of my CONTAINER named WJBCONT01 with the contents I expected of "WJBBEGIN" at the start and "WJBEND" at the end. If my container contained ASCII data, I could enter the IPCS ASCII command to view the data in ascii. alt text

I hope this helps you locate the CONTAINER for the CICS task you are looking for. The IBM Knowledge Center topic CICS facilities that use 64-bit storage describes what CICS places in 64 bit storage.

If you have trouble seeing the images above, you can click on the .png attachments below to view larger images.

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Product Synonym

CICS/TS CICSTS CICS TS CICS Transaction Server

Document Information

Modified date:
09 February 2015

UID

dwa1174451