
Benefits of using the CICS PA dialog
To create a report or perform another task in CICS PA, you can use the CICS PA dialog, which creates the necessary JCL, or type the JCL manually. There are several advantages when you use the dialog.
- Guaranteed syntax and option integrity. When you use the dialog, CICS PA constructs the JCL so syntax errors are eliminated.
- Extensive dialog help and field help provide a quick and easy way to understand the many report options.
- Faster creation of reports and forms. Because CICS PA creates the JCL, you can define and submit complex reports and forms in minutes rather than hours.
- Use report sets to run multiple reports, loads, or extracts in a single execution with a single read of the SMF data. This is a major performance advantage because the SMF data is processed once instead of multiple times for multiple reports or extracts. It would not be easy to code the equivalent jobs manually.
- Select files automatically using system definitions so that you don't need to identify the required files and place them in the JCL.
- Housekeeping. Features such as DB2 table management and HDB maintenance make housekeeping easy, especially when migrating to a new release of CICS.
- Defining CICS PA resources. The dialog provides the only way to define some CICS PA resources such as HDBs, resource lists, alerts, and application groups.
- Online statistics analysis.
- New users. The dialog provides an easier way for new users to learn the product and understand its many features.
- Flexibility. If you use the dialog, you still have the flexibility to edit the JCL that it creates, so that you can customize the job as required.
