Installing the CICS Information Center in the CICS Explorer

You can download and install a copy of the CICS® Information Center into your CICS Explorer™, so that all, or some of, the documentation is local and can be searched and viewed easily from within the CICS Explorer.

Before you begin

The CICS Information Center is available as an Eclipse software update site which means that you can install it in the CICS Explorer. However in its entirety it is very large, so you might consider downloading only some of the topics. You can select the topics to download during the software update process.

The update site for CICS TS version 4.1 is already predefined in CICS Explorer but must be enabled before it can be accessed. To enable the update site click Help > Software Updates on the menu bar. In the Software Updates and Add-ons dialog, click the Available Software tab, then click Manage Sites. Select the check box next to http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/cicsts/4.1/ and click OK to enable the update site, then continue from step 5 in the procedure below.
Note: You can only have one version of the CICS TS Information Center installed at a time. If you want to change the installed version of the Information center for a different version, you must uninstall the current version first. Select it in the Installed Software page and click Uninstall.

To download another version of the CICS Information Center, follow the procedure below:

Procedure

  1. Click Help > Software Updates on the menu bar.
  2. Click Available Software.
  3. Click Add Site.
  4. In the Add Site dialog, specify the location of the CICS Information Center update site and click OK. The update site for CICS TS version 3.2 is located at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/cicsts/3.2/
  5. The update site is added to the list of available software. The CICS Explorer interrogates the update site and displays a list of the software available for download as shown in this screen capture of the CICS TS v4.1 update site.
    A screen capture of the Software Updates dialog showing all the software available for download at the CICS TS v4.1 Information Center download site. The section CICS TS Vx.x primary information is selected.
    Click the check box to select the documentation to download. Most the CICS TS documentation, including the PDF files, is contained in the file CICS TS Vx.x primary information.
  6. Click Install. The selected software is downloaded and installed in the CICS Explorer.

Results

When all the software is downloaded successfully and the necessary files installed into the product, you are prompted to restart the CICS Explorer. Click Yes when asked to exit and restart the Workbench for the changes to take effect. When the CICS Explorer restarts, the CICS Information Center topics are displayed in the Help Contents view, and any search identifies results in the CICS Information Center topics as well as the CICS Explorer help topics.