What is Business Application Services (BAS)?

Business Application Services (BAS) is an alternative to resource definition online (RDO) that enables you to manage CICS® resources in terms of the business application to which they belong, rather than their physical location in the CICSplex.

A business application can be any set of resources that represent a meaningful entity in your enterprise. Within the application, you can group together resources of a particular type and define the runtime characteristics of that group. At run time, you can refine the selection of resources to be installed by using a filter expression, and you can change the resource attributes by using an override expression.

BAS facilities

BAS enables you to view and manage your resources in terms of their use in your business, and independently of their physical location. It provides the following facilities:
Centralized resource definition
With BAS, you can implement resource definition and association across the entire CICSplex. Resource definitions are held in a CICS system definition data set (CSD). The CICSPlex® SM data repository (EYUDREP) can serve as the central repository for CICS resource definitions, accessed by all the CICS systems in the CICSplex. CICSPlex SM minimizes the number of resource definitions you need for your CICSplex by:
  • Providing a single-system image approach to defining CICS resources across all supported platforms.
  • Producing both local and remote instances of a resource from the attributes of a single definition.
  • Managing multiple versions of a resource definition. For example, you can have different versions of the resources for an application as it progresses through a number of test phases and finally to production.

    Each time you create a new definition for the same resource and the same name, you can assign a version number or let BAS assign an available version number. BAS can manage up to 15 versions of the same resource definition, so the version number is an integer in the range 1 through 15. Note that a new version number is not created if you update the resource. You can identify a specific version of a resource definition by its version number.

    Version support allows you to develop resource definitions as your business applications develop. You can then have, for example, a single version of a resource in multiple groups, or multiple versions of the resource throughout the CICSplex. Note that you can install only one version of a resource in a CICS system at one time.

    For more information, see Multiple versions of a resource definition.

  • Generating multiple CICS communication links from a single set of connection and session definitions.

    You can create one set of BAS resource objects to define the connection definitions and reuse them in many CICS regions by using a system link (SYSLINK) object.

    The system link definition describes the type of connection and connection definitions that are required to create a connection between a pair of CICS regions. You can use these connection definitions as a model to create any number of system links that share the same characteristics.

    You can define different types of connections using SYSLINK objects:

    • MRO or ISC connections require CONNDEF and SESSDEF resource objects to describe the CONNECTION and SESSION resources.
    • IPIC connections require IPCONDEF and TCPDEF resource objects to describe the IPCONN and TCPIPSERVICE resources.

    When you install a SYSLINK that uses these model definitions, the resource definitions are installed in the CICS regions automatically to create the connection.

    For more information, see CICS system link definitions.

Logical scoping
When your CICS resources are defined to CICSPlex SM, you can monitor and control those resources in terms of their participation in a named business application, rather than their physical location in the CICSplex. You can identify and refer to logically related resources as a set, regardless of where they reside at any given time.

You can reuse and associate sets of definitions with any number of other logical associations of resources that reflect your business needs, rather than your system configuration.

If you set the scope to be your application, any operation or monitoring views will display only those resources that satisfy your selection criteria. This gives you the power to control precisely how those resources are managed

Distributed resource installation
Resources that are defined to CICSPlex SM must still be installed in the appropriate systems, either by CICS or CICSPlex SM. You can use BAS to install your resources automatically at CICS initialization, or dynamically while a region is running. You can install a single resource in multiple CICS regions either locally or remotely, as appropriate.

Supported resources

Business Application Services supports the following CICS resources:
Application resources
These are the resources that support the business applications at your enterprise. They are the resources that an application requires to run:
  • CICS BTS process types
  • Db2® connections and transactions
  • Document templates
  • FEPI nodes, pools, property sets and targets
  • Files and file key segment definitions
  • IPIC connections
  • LIBRARY resources
  • Map sets
  • Partition sets
  • Pipeline
  • Programs
  • Sysplex enqueue models
  • TCP/IP services
  • Temporary storage models
  • Transactions
  • Transient data queues
  • URI maps
  • Web services
Region property resources
These region property resources are the global resources that support the running of a CICS region:
  • Journals
  • Journal models
  • Local shared resource (LSR) pools
  • Profiles
  • Transaction classes
  • Terminals
  • Typeterms
Connectivity resources
These resources support the creation of connections between CICS regions and other systems:
  • Connections
  • Partners
  • Sessions
  • TCP/IP services
  • IP interconnectivity (IPIC) connections