The IBM CICS Explorer

The CICS Explorer is a system management tool that is designed to provide a simple, easy to use way of managing one or more CICS systems. Based on an Eclipse platform, it provides a view of some of the CICSPlex SM functions in CICS Transaction Server and a platform for the integration of future CICS tools.

Today, you manage CICS regions with a variety of stand-alone graphical and non-graphical user interfaces, and with no common way of performing tasks. The CICS Explorer provides a base set of CICSPlex SM functions to manage CICS regions, and 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.

CICS Explorer connects to either a CICSPlex SM WUI server or a single CICS region. When connected to a CICSPlex SM WUI server, CICS Explorer operations views provide a single-system image of all the CICS resources within a CICSplex. When the CICS Explorer is connected to a CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS® version 3 system, the resources can only be browsed. 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 using the operations views :
The CICS Explorer administration views display 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

The CICS Explorer resource editor displays the resource definition attributes in one or more pages in the editor. One page, the Attributes page, displays the attributes in tabular form grouped together in the same way as they appear in CEDA or the CICSPlex SM WUI to facilitate the move to CICS Explorer for experienced CICS users. The other page, or pages, display the attributes logically grouped together, but each attribute has more detail provided to simplify the update process for less-experienced CICS users. 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.

The CICS Explorer contains context and more detailed help for the resource views and help on using the CICS Explorer and the basic Eclipse functions. Detailed help for CICS and CICSPlex SM is found in the CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Information Center. Detailed help for Eclipse is found at the Eclipse homepage.