Viewing CICS resources

A CICS® resource view provides information about resources in the connected CICS region or CICSplex. You can customize the layout of a resource view to show the data in a way that suits your business needs. Related views are grouped into tab groups, and each tab group is contained in a pane in the workbench window. When multiple views are present in a pane, they are stacked behind each other.

Continue to read this topic for basics about CICS Explorer® resource views. The following table summarizes all tasks related to resource views for you to explore later.

Available views

CICS Explorer provides operation views and definition views that are specific to CICS besides views that are derived from z/OS® Explorer.

Operation views
Display the CICS resources that support day-to-day operation and management of the enterprise. When CICS Explorer is connect to a CICSPlex® WUI or a single CICS region, the operation views show the resources in one or more running CICS regions, and mirror the functionality currently provided for CICS regions. You can use operation views to:
  • Enable and disable resources
  • Open and disable resources
  • Acquire and release resources
  • Place resources in and out of service
  • Purge tasks that are associated with a resource
  • Discard resource definitions from a CICS system where they are installed
When CICS Explorer is connected to a z/VSE® 5.1 or later system, you can browse resources. When CICS Explorer is connected to a z/VSE 6.1 or later system, you can also process information about specific supported resources. For details, see IBM Systems Products and Components - z/VSE.
Definition views

Display details of the CICS and CICSPlex SM resource definitions. You can perform actions against the resources, including creating new resource definitions and updating existing definitions by using the CICS Explorer resource editor.

Views derived from z/OS Explorer

Because CICS Explorer is built on z/OS Explorer, CICS Explorer also contains views that are provided by z/OS Explorer, for example, Console, z/OS Jobs, Host Connections, and so on. See z/OS views.

Example views in a perspective

The screen capture in Figure 1 shows a perspective with some views in four tab groups. The selected views are:
  1. The CICSplex Explorer view, which shows the CICSplex and CICS regions to which CICS Explorer is connected.
  2. The Programs view, which shows information about currently installed programs in the connected CICS region or CICSplex.
  3. The Properties view, which shows details about the properties of the selected resource.
  4. The Help view, which dynamically shows help information for CICS Explorer users based on the context.
Figure 1. Example CICS SM perspective
Example CICS SM perspective.

Opening a view

To open a view that is not currently displayed, click Window > Show View > Other on the main menu for the workbench, and select a view from the Show View window.

For more ways to open a view, see Opening views.

Moving and resizing views

In CICS Explorer, the CICSplex Explorer view is always opened in a fixed location. For other views, you can move them around by dragging the view tabs and resize them by dragging their edges. You can stack several views together or split them.

For more information, see the section about customizing perspectives in Using CICS Explorer perspectives.

Refreshing contents in a view

When you open a view for the first time, CICS Explorer downloads the view data from your CICSplex. Any subsequent changes to resources in your CICSplex are not displayed in the view until you refresh the content, by clicking the Refresh icon Refresh icon on the toolbar of the view.

Customizing resource views

For views that show resource data in a tabular format, you can customize how the views present data either directly in the view or in the CICS View Configuration dialog. To customize a view quickly, for example, for troubleshooting purposes, it is recommended that you do it directly in the workbench. Use the page when you need to make permanent changes to views for reuse.

Customizing a view directly in the workbench
Besides sorting, filtering, and aggregating data, you can resize and move columns around directly in the view by dragging them.
Unless you save your settings to view configuration, your changes are temporary, which means they are retained when you reopen or refresh the view, but you cannot revert to a previously customized view if you have made changes in between.
Using the CICS View Configuration dialog
If you use the view configuration dialog to customize a view, you can control which resource attributes to show as columns, resize or reorder the columns, and filter, sort, or aggregate data in the view by one or more resource attributes. These changes are saved to the view configuration so that you can reuse a customized view at another time.