Shipping terminal and connection definitions

If you are using z/OS® Communications Server terminals on your terminal-owning region, you can arrange for a terminal definition to be shipped from the terminal-owning region to the application-owning region whenever it is required. If you use this method, you do not need to define the terminal on the application-owning region.

When a remote transaction is invoked from a shippable terminal, the request that is transmitted to the application-owning region is flagged to show that a shippable terminal definition is available. If the application-owning region already has a valid definition of the terminal (which might have been shipped previously), it ignores the flag. Otherwise, it asks for the definition to be shipped.

Shipped terminal definitions are propagated to the connected CICS® system using the communication sessions providing the connection. When a terminal definition is shipped to another region, the TCTUA is also shipped, except when the principal facility is an APPC parallel session. When a routed transaction terminates, information from the TCTTE and the TCTUA is communicated back to the region that owns the terminal.

Terminal definitions can be shipped across intermediate systems. If you use shippable terminals and there is more than one possible path from the AOR to the TOR, you might want to specify the preferred path by defining indirect links to the TOR on the AOR and the intermediate systems (see Defining indirect links for transaction routing).

When a shipped definition is to be installed on an intermediate or application-owning region, the autoinstall user program is invoked in that region. If the name of the shipped definition clashes with that of a remote terminal or connection already installed on the region, CICS assigns an alias to the shipped definition, and passes the alias to the autoinstall user program. CICS-generated aliases for shipped terminals and connections are recognizable by their first character, which is always '{'. Their remaining three characters can have the values 'AAA' through '999'. Your autoinstall user program can accept a CICS-generated alias, override it, or reject the installation. Note that it can also specify an alias for a shipped definition when there is no clash with an installed remote definition.

You need to consider assigning aliases to shipped definitions if, for example, you have two or more terminal-owning regions that use similar sets of terminal identifiers for transaction routing to the same AOR. For information about writing an autoinstall user program to control the installation of shipped terminals, see Writing a program to control autoinstall of shipped terminals.