CICS COMMAREA missing in started transaction

Investigation of the pseudo-conversational transaction indicates that the transaction completes with an EXEC CICS RETURN TRANSID(xxxx) COMMAREA and the terminal is now awaiting an attention identifier (AID) from the user.

If a task is started on the same terminal from another terminal or from a non-terminal task, the started transaction starts running but is passed the COMMAREA from the original pseudoconversational task.

Once the second task has ended and an AID is passed, the next transaction from the original pseudoconversational transaction will start but have no COMMAREA.

A pseudoconversational transaction can be interrupted by a STARTed transaction, and that is the way the code was designed. It is up to the design of the user application to manage such interrupts. The above process is fully documented in the CICS Application Programming Guide under section Pseudoconversational and Conversational Design section and the topic terminal interruptibility.

Basically, if the pseudoconversational transaction is not to be interrupted then the application needs to specify the IMMEDIATE option on the EXEC CICS RETURN command or SET TERMINAL to NOATI. After making one of these changes, the COMMAREA should be available to the application.

Note: The CESN transaction is a pseudoconversational transaction and can be interrupted by a START command.