Sharing data across transactions

CICS® has several facilities for sharing data across transactions. You can use the Common Work Area (CWA), the TCTTE user area (TCTUA), the COMMAREA, the display screen, or channels and containers.

Data stored in the TCTUA and the CWA is available to any transaction in the system. Subject to resource security and storage protection restrictions, any transaction can write to them and any transaction can read them.

Instead of using a communication area (COMMAREA), a more modern method of passing data to the next program in a pseudoconversation is to use a channel. Channels have several advantages over COMMAREAs (see Benefits of channels). To pass a channel on a RETURN command, you use the CHANNEL option in place of the COMMAREA option. Channels are described in Transferring data between programs using channels.

The use of some of these facilities might cause inter-transaction affinities. See Affinity for more information about transaction affinities.