IBM Support

Viewing ASCII files in CICS Explorer

Question & Answer


Question

Is there any way to get CICS Explorer to display ASCII files correctly? When using CICS Transaction Server for z/OS (CICS TS) V5, Liberty messages.log is encoded in ASCII, however, opening this with CICS Explorer V5.1 does not display correctly.

Answer

If using the CICS Explorer V5.3 and the z/OS UNIX Files view with an FTP connection then both ASCII, EBCDIC or Unicode XML files should be automatically displayed correctly. The Liberty messages.log file is an ASCII file and is tagged as containing data encoded in ISO-8859-1 (see ls -T command) and so does not need to be converted from ASCII when displayed on a workstation. Its recommended to upgrade to the latest version of CICS Explorer if you are having any problems viewing zFS files.

However, if you are still not able to view zFS files correctly the the solution depends on which connection method is being used to transfer the file from the z/OS environment to the workstation.

  • When using the z/OS UNIX files view with an FTP connection the local and remote SBCS character sets in the connection dialog tell the Explorer the character sets to use during conversion of character files, and Explorer is usually able to figure out if conversion is required. However, this can be overridden by changing the Properties > Resource > Transfer mode from Default to ASCII (meaning convert) or Binary (no conversion) to view an ASCII file such as messages.log

  • If using the Remote Systems view in z/OS Explorer with a connection to the RSE daemon then you can set the encoding of either files or directories, using the menu Properties > Info > File encoding. The simplest way to view ASCII files such as messages.log is to set File encoding as ISO-8859-1 for the entire Liberty server logs directory, which will then override the connection default which is usually an EBCDIC encoding such as Cp1047.

Phil Wakelin
IBM CICS Design & Strategy - Java Adoption

[{"Business Unit":{"code":"BU058","label":"IBM Infrastructure w\/TPS"},"Product":{"code":"SSGMGV","label":"CICS Transaction Server"},"Platform":[{"code":"PF035","label":"z\/OS"}],"Component":"Liberty","Version":"","Line of Business":{"code":"LOB35","label":"Mainframe SW"}}]

Product Synonym

CICS/TS CICSTS CICS TS CICS Transaction Server

Document Information

Modified date:
02 March 2017

UID

dwa1359321