Passing data to other programs

You can pass data to another program by using the EXEC CICS program control commands LINK, XCTL, and RETURN, and using the COMMAREA, CHANNEL, or INPUTMSG options of those commands. COMMAREA and CHANNEL are mutually exclusive.

Instead of using a COMMAREA, using a channel is a more modern method of transferring data between CICS® programs. Channels have several advantages over COMMAREAs. For details, see Transferring data between programs using channels.