EXCI should support CHANNEL and CONTAINER

This RFE is satisfied by CICS TS 5.4 which is generally available from today June 16th 2017.
For more information see the announcement letter https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=an&subtype=ca&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS217-113

EXCI now supports the channels and containers API. A channel and set of containers can be passed on an EXCI EXEC API call or an EXCI call level DPL call.

Any CICS applications coded to the channel and containers API and invoked using distributed Program Link (DPL) can also be invoked unchanged from an EXCI client, including CICS applications that run on earlier CICS TS releases that support channels and containers. The EXCI cleint needs to use CICS TS 5.4 EXCI libraries.

This RFE is satisfied by CICS TS 5.4 which was announced on May 16th 2017 with a planned general availability date of June 16th 2017.
For more information see the announcement letter https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=an&subtype=ca&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS217-113

EXCI now supports the channels and containers API. A channel and set of containers can be passed on an EXCI EXEC API call or an EXCI call level DPL call.

Any CICS applications coded to the channel and containers API and invoked using distributed Program Link (DPL) can also be invoked unchanged from an EXCI client, including CICS applications that run on earlier CICS TS releases that support channels and containers. The EXCI cleint needs to use CICS TS 5.4 EXCI libraries.

This is something we would like to address. The RFE is being moved into 'Planned for Future release' status. Please note:
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Due to processing by IBM, this request was reassigned to have the following updated attributes:
Brand - Servers and Systems Software
Product family - Transaction Processing
Product - CICS Transaction Server

For recording keeping, the previous attributes were:
Brand - WebSphere
Product family - Transaction Processing
Product - CICS Transaction Server

Accessing CICS from Batch/TSO with CHANNEL/CONTAINER seems a very obviousl feature to me. Our developers had early and very easily adopt Channel/Container style because of its many advantages within their CICS-applications and are surprised when they learn that they have to fall back to 32KB commarea to integrate CICS into batch applications.

Got my vote! EXCI should work the same as CTG. We use EXCI for batch integration and are looking to use Channels and Containers as part of that process.

Agree with the Comments from Landi.

The IPIC suggestion would provide the functions we would require of a Batch based interface.

Having support much like CTG where applications can control when a sync-point is taken would be the better direction.

I will add my vote for this also!

For us, the usage of IPIC would be OK in the first step. For your second question: Yes, we would need "Transactional EXCI" to also support Channels and Containers. SYNCONRETURN is not sufficient for our scenarios.

Channels and Container support for EXCI is something we would like to address in a future release.

No IPIC is not currently available from batch to CICS, ie EXCI always uses MRO.

Channels and Container support for EXCI is something we would like to address in a future release.

I wondered about this as well. I was going to investigate using the EXCI interface to call a CICS Web Service from batch. Is IPIC available from batch to CICS? I was going to create a CICS wrapper program that would receive the input from batch and populate the DFHWS-DATA container, then call the application. The wrapper would have to look for soap faults or the appropriate output in the DFHWS-data container. This whole data exchange would technically happen outside of CICS Web Service. The Service would be called as though it were a program to program call via a CICS link.

This is a well understood requirement. One option for us might be to provide channel and container support via IPIC only (ie provide a variant of EXCI that works via IPIC rather than MRO), do you have any views on this ? Secondly, is there a requirement for Transactional EXCI to support Channels and Containers, or just the normal DPL with SYNCONRETURN ?