CICS DBCTL recovery tokens

Recovery tokens are created by CICS® and passed to DBCTL. They are unique identifiers for each UOW. The lifetime of a recovery token is the same as for a UOW.

You can use them to correlate work done between CICS and DBCTL in the same UOW. Each recovery token is 16 bytes long; the first 8 bytes are the CICS APPLID (passed to DBCTL when CICS is first connected) and the second 8 bytes are a UOW identifier. CICS creates an identifier like this for every UOW. DBCTL validates the recovery token to protect against duplication of UOWs. You can use the recovery token in certain operator commands. For example, you can display it as part of the output of the /DISP CCTL and CEMT INQ TASK commands, and you can enter it in /CHANGE commands, in the form of a pseudo recovery token. The recovery token is included in certain messages (for example, the CICS message DFHDB8109, which is issued when a DL/I request has failed). Recovery tokens can be useful in problem determination, because they are displayed in dumps produced by CICS and DBCTL and in trace entries produced by CICS. See Troubleshooting DBCTL for more information.

The pseudo recovery token is an 8-character decimal token, which can be used in place of the 8-byte hexadecimal recovery token and is displayed when the status of a thread is indoubt. It is made shorter than the recovery token so that it is easier to make note of (for example, from /DISPLAY commands) and enter (for example, in /CHANGE commands).

Figure 1 shows a pseudo recovery token (00010040 in the column headed PSEUDO-RTKN) and a recovery token (F0F58879641002C2) for thread number 4 (in the column headed REGID) for PSBNAME PC3COCHD, whose STATUS is INDOUBT.

Figure 1. /DISPLAY CCTL cctlname command showing pseudo recovery token

0080  /DIS CCTL DBDCCICS
0080  DFS000I MESSAGE(S) FROM ID=SYS1 047
0080      CCTL     PSEUDO-RTKN  RECOVERY-TOKEN   REGID  PSBNAME   STATUS
0080      DBDCCICS                                                ATTACHED
0080                            9EDA1F61E11CFA02     6  PC3COCHD  ACTIVE
0080                            9EDA1F4E9B571B02     5  PC3COCHD  ACTIVE
0080               00010040     F0F58879641002C2     4  PC3COCHD  INDOUBT