Managing CICS conversations

A conversational transaction is one which processes several sets of input from a terminal before returning control to CICS®. The length of time required for a response from a terminal is much longer than the time taken to process it, therefore a conversational transaction lasts much longer than a nonconversational transaction, which processes one set of input before relinquishing control. While a transaction is running it is using storage and resources which might be needed by other transactions. For this reason many CICS transactions operate in pseudoconversational mode.

A pseudoconversational transaction is one in which the conversation between a terminal and a server is broken up into a number of segments, each of which is a nonconversational transaction. As each transaction ends, it provides the name of the transaction to be run to process the next input from the terminal. When a transaction that has just ended specifies the name of a transaction to process the next input, this name is passed to the user application. The application must not attempt to start a different transaction, but must use the returned information to start the specified transaction and send the data it is expecting.