PF and PA keys to page through data not working in CICS

Special PF and PA keys like PA1 and PA2 might fail to work in a new CICS region if the configuration is not set up correctly. CICS processes incoming VTAM data in a specific order. You might have defined the key to do a different function that could interfere with the way you want the key to work.

Here are a few possibilities.

1) If you are using BMS paging sessions, you might have failed to configure the System Initialization Table ( SIT ) with the proper options. Check that you have these attributes defined correctly:

• BMS should have the FULL option specified.

• PGCHAIN

• PGCOPY

• PGPURGE

• PGRET - defines the page up and down functions.

• SKRxxxx - defines the keys to represent the page up and down functions.

2) You might have defined the PRINT= option in the SIT with one of the keys you intended to use for paging. For instance, in the VSE operating system, the ICCF samples have PRINT=PA1 as a default. This will be processed before it can be passed into the application or BMS. Remove the PRINT option from your SIT if you did not intend to use it.

3) You might have defined any of the following keys for a page retrieval command:
PA1 PA2 PA3 PF1 PF2 PF3 PF4 PF5 PF6 PF7 PF8 PF9 PF10 PF11 PF12 PF13 PF14 PF15 PF16 PF17 PF18 PF19 PF20 PF20 PF20 PF20 PF20

Additional keywords: PAx PFx page-retrieval-command map display up down