Using affinities

CICS® transactions and programs use many different techniques to pass data from one to another. Some of these techniques require that the transactions or programs exchanging data must run in the same CICS region. This imposes restrictions on the regions to which transactions and distributed program link (DPL) requests can be dynamically routed. If transactions or programs exchange data in ways that impose such restrictions, there is said to be an affinity among them.

About this task

The affinity-related functions of CICS IA help users of CICS dynamic routing, who need to determine whether any transactions in their CICS applications use programming techniques that require some transactions to be run in the same region (creating an inter-transaction affinity), or in a specific region (creating a transaction-system affinity). Application programmers can also use CICS IA to detect whether the programs they develop are likely to cause transaction affinities.

Procedure

  1. Right-click a region, transaction, or program to display the menu, then click Show Affinities By Type.
  2. Click the type of affinity that you want to display results for. The results are displayed in the Affinities view.