In this chapter, we introduce the new Customer Information Control System (CICS) Explorer by giving you an overview before we introduce more basic capabilities.

As a newcomer into a CICS environment or as an experienced user moving roles, CICS System Management can be a daunting challenge. Prior to the CICS Explorer, to perform each task could require the use of different disconnected interfaces. These applications were often ISPF-based panels and written to do a specific function, each of which required custom knowledge to operate. If the completion of a specific task crossed application boundaries, you had to switch back and forth between the applications, which each had its own commands and user interface.

As well as basic CICS System Management, the definition and operation of regions and their installed resources, a typical CICS shop uses a number of tools, either obtained from IBM, third-party vendors, or developed in-house. These tools might have their own interfaces and way of presenting or manipulating the CICS runtime.

Providing an integration platform so that all of the tools and applications that a user needs to perform a business task work together coherently in an integrated environment was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the CICS Explorer. The benefit of CICS Explorer is to help new users become familiar with the platform, to present a single and re-usable way of accessing and manipulating CICS to promote consistency, and to allow tools that are built by IBM, vendors, and customers alike to be able to extend and enhance in a unified way. Each tool must introduce its own value to CICS management without having to reinvent or redefine the interface to the base platform itself.

As a system management tool the CICS Explorer is designed to be a scalable and intuitive way to manage a single CICS region, a collection of regions within a CICSplex, or a collection of CICSplexes. Experienced system programmers can quickly identify and tune their systems while newer users can be guided through the intuitive interface to learn how to perform standard tasks. By having a consolidated approach to system management, the number of interfaces that are required by CICS system administrators to learn to become effective is reduced, which helps to make the effort of attracting and training new developers and system programmers easier and less expensive.

The CICS Explorer is based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). Eclipse RCP is a cross platform framework for building and deploying PC desktop applications. One of the features of Eclipse that makes it a good choice of technology for the CICS Explorer is its plug-in architecture, which allows different components to be added that can extend and complement each other. A number of plug-ins exist that can be integrated into Eclipse environments, such as workflow, messaging clients, or development tools. One of these products is IBM Rational Developer for Z, which is an integrated development environment for the System z platform that allows the creation of programs that access the CICS API to perform transaction processing. By both products sharing Eclipse as their common base technology, the CICS Explorer integrates within IBM Rational Developer for System z version (version 7.5 or higher) to provide system administrative capabilities to CICS application developers.

The CICS Explorer can be extended by plug-in providers using the Explorer API / SDK. Using the Explorer API / SDK customers can develop their own dedicated plug-ins to satisfy requirements particular to them. Using this framework maintains the consistency of the interface and integrates with the rest of the functionality that is provided in the Explorer and is the mechanism by which IBM and vendors provide plug-ins for their value-add tools.

Figure 1-1 shows how CICS Explorer and Eclipse RCP platform fit together.

At this point the CICS Explorer is not a full-functional replacement for the CICSPlex System Manager Web User Interface. Users who are comfortable with the Web user interface (WUI), or the more traditional CEMT and CEDA commands in CICS, can enjoy using them as before with the CICS Explorer providing a rich way to administer and perform operational tasks on CICS systems in a fashion that allows extension and customization by tools and third-party plug-ins.

The CICS Explorer provides a base set of CICSPlex SM functions to manage CICS regions, resources, and definitions. It also provides a platform on which future CICS tools that are integrated in the Eclipse RCP can perform tasks and present the information in a common way.

Figure 1-2 shows the different set ups.

When connected to a CICSPlex SM WUI server, CICS Explorer operations views provide a single-system image of all of the CICS resources within a CICSplex. When the CICS Explorer is connected to a CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Version 3 system, you can only browse the resources. However, when the CICS Explorer is connected to a CICS Transaction Server for z/OS version 4 CICSPlex SM WUI or a single CICS region, you can perform the following actions on operational resources:

The CICS Explorer displays details of the CICS and CICSPlex SM resource definitions, and when the CICS Explorer is connected to a CICS Transaction Server for z/OS version 4 CICSPlex SM WUI, you can use the administration views and the resource editor to perform the following actions:

Administration operations are not supported in a single CICS region in the CICS Explorer version 1.0.

Table 1-1 to Table 1-3 on page 8 shows exactly what can you do with the Explorer, given a particular set up and CICS version.

The CICS Explorer also displays Events and Active Workloads in a CICSPlex or single region and Properties for CICSPlex SM Objects.

In addition, using the CICS Explorer you can define connections to multiple systems; however, only one connection can be active at a time.

The CICS Explorer shows the CICSplexes, CICS systems, and regions for your current connection, the different system and resource groups, and their related resources. Using the CICS Explorer you can navigate to resources by selecting a context, and then resources are displayed in different tabular views depending on their type. You can customize the attributes that display, enable filtering on attributes, select resources, and perform any appropriate actions.

The CICS Explorer uses rich editors to display resource definition attributes in one or more pages. To simplify the update process for less-experienced CICS users, attributes are logically grouped together, and each attribute has more detail provided. Every attribute benefits from field-level verification, where the entry is validated in real time. Errors are identified by the Error icon, which identifies the field in error and the page on which the field appears. Additionally, the embedded help system can provide assistance for the entire editor or for a specific field, which allows you to quickly get the information that you require.

To facilitate the move to CICS Explorer for experienced CICS users, one page in the rich editor, the Attributes page, displays the attributes in tabular form, grouped together in the same way that they appear in CEDA or in the CICSPlex SM WUI. For users on a CICS Version 3, system resource definitions are also displayed in this way; however, you cannot edit them.

The CICS Explorer has an embedded help system to provide context and more detailed help for the resources and help about using the CICS Explorer and the basic Eclipse functions. More detailed help for CICS and CICSPlex SM is at the CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Information Center.

The CICS Explorer is an Eclipse RCP-based GUI application that runs on the Microsoft® Windows® and Linux® operating systems. The user interface to the applications is through the workspace, which is a graphical multi-window environment that is built into Eclipse. The Eclipse platform is structured as subsystems that are implemented in one or more plug-ins. The subsystems are built on top of a small runtime engine.

The workspace is a single window that consists of views and perspectives, and can contain other elements, such as editors, menus, and the help system.

The CICS Explorer uses a subset of the Eclipse plug-ins to build its workspace. The CICS Explorer runs completely standalone, and no prior installation of Eclipse is required; however, it is necessary to understand some of the concepts from Eclipse to make full use of all that the Explorer offers.

In this section, we discuss the concepts of Eclipse.

A perspective is a layout of one or more views in the workspace. You can define your own perspectives to suit your particular needs.

You can tailor a perspective by adding new views, removing existing views, moving views around, or changing the size of views. When you close CICS Explorer, any changes that you made to the perspective are saved, and the next time that CICS Explorer starts, your tailored perspective is displayed. This tailoring feature allows you to create a view of CICS that contains the set of resources that makes the most sense for a particular role and its tasks in your CICS environment.

You can restore the default perspective at any time by going to the main workspace menu bar and clicking Window → Reset → Perspective.

You can create and save multiple perspectives, for example, you might want to set up one perspective that only shows the administration views and one perspective that only shows the operation views. For further information about using perspectives, see the related links.

When you save a perspective, you save only the layout of the views and editors in the workspace. If you change the width of a column in a view, that change is applied to that column in every perspective that contains the view. Any filter attributes that you set are retained when you switch to another perspective or view because a perspective is a definition of which views should be shown and their relative position, not their contents. The content is a property of the view that crosses perspective boundaries. The ability to create multiple instances of the same view with different filter or layout criteria might be included in a future release of the CICS Explorer, but it is not currently supported.

The CICS Explorer comes with two built-in perspectives:

The System Management perspective is the first perspective that is presented when the Welcome page closes on first startup of the CICS Explorer. It contains information about the currently connected CICS systems, which includes the active regions, the running tasks, and so forth. If there is no active CICS system connection, all of the views in the perspective are empty.

The Resource perspective is the same perspective that is included with most Eclipse-based products and shows a set of files that are locally held on your computer file system. These files can be any file that you import into your Eclipse environment. In the CICS Explorer, the Resource perspective presents and allows manipulation of content that is typically destined for deployment into an HFS folder that is associated with a CICS resource definition.

Each perspective contains one of more views. A view is a visual component and provides a way to navigate the information in your workspace.

The CICS Explorer uses some views that are provided with Eclipse itself, such as the Properties View, which shows attributes for a CICS resource or repository definition, and the Package view, which shows contents of a project for use in a CICS bundle. As well as using these existing Eclipse views, the CICS Explorer has a number of CICS-specific views that are arranged into a number of high-level conceptual categories. Views that display similar information are grouped together into tab groups. Each tab group is contained within a pane in the workspace window.

Figure 1-3 provides an example of the Views.

Using the CICSplex and CICSPlex Repositories view you can see a list of CICSplexes and active regions or CICSPlex repositories and defined definitional or system groups.

CICS Resources are divided into two categories:

Administrative resources are those that reside in a repository, such as a CSD or CICSplex SM data repository (also known as BAS) and Transaction Definition or File Definition. Each CICS resource has a specific view.

Operational resources represent live CICS resources that are installed into an active CICS region, such as tasks, programs, or files.

If the view that shows a particular resource is not present in the perspective, open it by clicking Window → Show View and searching for the view by name. Alternately, use the pull-down menu Administration or Operational, and locate the appropriate view by resource name. In a CICS view, the pop-up menu shows a list of tasks that can be taken against the selected resource(s), one of which is open that activates an editor. We cover this topic more in “Editors overview” on page 13.

The content of the resources views is scoped by the selected entry in one of the navigational views where appropriate. This scope is illustrated by the Tasks view, which shows all tasks for the selected sysplex, if one is selected in the CICSplex view. The Tasks view shows all tasks for the selected region if one is selected; likewise, for a view that shows CICS definitions, such as File Definitions, the scope of this is either all definitions for the selected CICSplex’s repository or for the selected resource definition group.

Each view has a title, which is displayed in a tab at the top of the view. Where multiple views are present in a view set, they are stacked one behind the other. To activate a view, click its tab to bring the view to the front of the stack. The tab is highlighted, which indicates the active view.

All views, with the exception of the CICSplex Explorer view, can be removed from view or moved to a different tab group, and each tab group can be sized or repositioned in the workspace. The CICSplex Explorer view is a special view that you cannot close or move.

You can restore the default tab group arrangement (perspective) at any time by going to the main workspace menu bar and clicking Window → Reset Perspective.

The editor area appears to the right of the views. Each editor for a CICS resource has a tab that is labelled Attributes. Under the Attributes tab is a list of attributes that are arranged in a tree, which is designed to be familiar to users who are comfortable with CEDA or CEMT categorization. For some definitions there are additional tabs, such as the Overview tab for the pipeline definition, which arranges the information using rich controls to add description and grouping to help identify and explain the attributes and their contents. If the current connection is to a CICS Management Client Interface or CMCI connection, you can make changes to the definition through the editor and save the changes to update the CICS resource or definition. If the current connection is to a CICS Plex System Manager connection, the editor only allows viewing of the resource’s attributes.

If you reset the perspective, the perspective is restored to the default layout; however, any open editors are unchanged and remain in the workspace. Similarly, if you change to another perspective, any open editors remain visible in the new perspective.