Configuring IP interconnectivity (IPIC) connections to CICS with Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces and Basic Authentication

Connect to CICS with basic authentication.

Before you begin

zosConnect-3.0 Applies to zosConnect-3.0.

Containers Applies to z/OS Connect container deployments.

Make sure that the following prerequisite tasks are complete:

About this task

You create the cics.xml file that uses environmental variables that are defined in the devfile.yaml file as inputs for the IPIC connection when you start your container at run time.

With this configuration, the z/OS Connect Designer can use basic authentication to authenticate with CICS. It is assumed that the target CICS region is configured to expect basic authentication credentials. That is, USERAUTH(VERIFY) is specified on the CICS IPCONN resource.

Tip: This tutorial demonstrates basic authentication. For other security configuration, see Configuring an IPIC connection to CICS.

After you provide your user ID and password, z/OS Connect Designer passes your credentials to CICS for authentication.

Figure 1. Passing only user credentials to CICS

Procedure

In your Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces Explorer window, create a new cics.xml file in the /catalog-manager-api/start/src/main/liberty/config directory with the following content.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<server description="IPIC connection to CICS">
    <featureManager>
        <feature>zosconnect:cics-1.0</feature>
    </featureManager>

    <zosconnect_cicsIpicConnection id="cicsConn" host="${CICS_HOST}" port="${CICS_PORT}" authDataRef="cicsCredentials"/>
    
    <zosconnect_authData id="cicsCredentials" user="${CICS_USER}" password="${CICS_PASSWORD}"/>
</server>

Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces Create File window — Figure 2. Creating a file in the Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces

Figure 3. The new cics.xml file in the Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces workspace

What to do next

Continue developing your API project by defining the operations for the CICS CatalogManager sample.