This section gives an overview of how to define CICS® programs as servers to DCE remote procedure calls (RPCs). For more detailed information, see the OS/390 DCE Application Support Programming Guide and the z/OS® Distributed Computing Environment: Application Support Configuration and Administration Guide.
CICS DCE server programs are called operations in DCE terminology.. Each RPC requests the execution of one operation. The declarations for each operation, including the specifications for the input and output parameters, are contained in an interface definition. You define one or more related operations in an interface, using the Interface Definition Language (IDL).
When you write your CICS server program and your DCE client program you must:
The client stub packages (marshalls) the RPC parameters for transmission over the network to the server, and unpackages (unmarshalls) the parameters received from the server.
The server stubs contain function that converts host COBOL data types to C data types and vice versa. They also package and unpackage RPC parameters, and convert data between EBCDIC and ASCII representations.
You must also define your server programs to CICS using RDO, as described in CICS Resource Definition Guide. The definitions can be statically defined and installed, or autoinstalled when the programs are first called.
When you have completed your CICS server program you need to advertise its availability to potential clients. You do this by using the Application Support server administration facilities to install the interface. This exports details of the interface to the DCE distributed directory. Client programs can then use DCE facilities to locate servers which support required interfaces.