Methods of accessing BAS

CICS Explorer

You can use CICS Explorer® for day-to-day management of resource definitions. The CICS Explorer is a system management tool that provides a simple, easy to use way of managing one or more CICS systems and associated resources. Resource definitions can be created and updated using the CICS Explorer resource definition editor.

The CICSPlex SM API

You can use the CICSPlex SM API to write external programs that automate the management of CICS® resource definitions. Such programs could be used to integrate the CICSPlex SM system management functions into your enterprise-wide change management process. For example, you could write an API program to coordinate resource definition changes with database or file updates, or the standard life cycle of an application.

The Web User Interface

You can use the Web User Interface (WUI) views for the day-to-day management of resource definitions. These views provide an immediate, interactive look at your resource definitions. You can create, update and remove resource definitions.

The views are grouped into basic and fully-functional BAS submenus:

• The basic views restrict the management of resources to the resource description, as used by CICS resource definition online (RDO).
• The fully functional menu, aimed at more advanced users, includes the option of managing resources by resource assignments as well as resource descriptions.

The batched repository-update facility

Defining large numbers of resources

The batched repository-update facility is ideal for creating and updating large numbers of resource definitions. You can start with an input file that contains one CREATE command for one resource definition and use that command as a template for other resource definitions. By copying and customizing the CREATE command, you can quickly build all the resource definitions of a given type that you require. When you submit the batched repository-update facility input file, CICSPlex SM creates all the resource definitions and adds them to the data repository.

Migrating resource definitions

The batched repository-update facility is an essential tool for migrating resource definitions from CICS to CICSPlex SM. CICSPlex SM provides an exit routine that can extract records from an existing CSD file and generate equivalent resource definitions for input to the batched repository-update facility. For more information about the exit routine, see Extracting records from the CSD.

Maintaining a centralized repository

The batched repository-update facility is useful for migrating resource definitions from one CICS platform to another, which is key to maintaining a centralized definition repository. You can use the DUMP command to retrieve existing resource definitions from the CICSPlex SM data repository. After making the required changes to the definitions, you can use the dump output as input to another batched repository-update facility run that creates resource definitions for the new CICS platform.