Analyzing your application and its data

The CICS® event binding editor formalizes the specification of business events, giving IT professionals a definitive statement of the requirement. Using the same tool, you define the technical changes necessary to initiate event processing.

About this task

Before that, the application analyst must do some research and analysis to understand how the business event is represented in the CICS application and system infrastructure.

This analysis cannot be automated. It requires an understanding of the existing application and data design, and might also require knowledge of the wider processes in the organization. The application analyst or programmer must review the application source code and determine the points in it that are significant. For example, in an application dealing with credit card transactions, a point of significance might be when the transaction amount is entered or when the identity of the customer is known.

After identifying a significant point in a program, the analyst determines the information that is available at the capture point to identify the unique event. The CICS event binding editor prompts you to state the criteria for creating an event and the data to be gathered in it.

You can create event capture points for events for many EXEC CICS API calls, and for CICS program start using the CICS event binding editor. Using these capture points requires no change to your CICS application program. If an event that you want to capture cannot be captured at one of these points, you can add a EXEC CICS SIGNAL EVENT command to your program to capture an event at any point.