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 are designed to help users of CICS dynamic routing, who need to determine whether any of the transactions in their CICS applications use programming techniques that require them to be run in the same region (creating an inter-transaction affinity), or in a particular region (creating a transaction-system affinity). CICS IA can also be used by application programmers to detect whether the programs they are developing are likely to cause transaction affinities.

Procedure

  1. Right-click on a Region, Transaction, or Program to show the context menu for Show Affinities By Type.
  2. From the context menu, hover your cursor over the Show Affinities By Type option to display a further submenu.
  3. From the submenu, select the type of affinity that you want to display results for. The results are displayed in the Affinities view.