The CICS Web services assistant

The CICS® Web services assistant is a set of batch utilities which can help you to transform existing CICS applications into Web services and to enable CICS applications to use Web services provided by external providers. The assistant supports rapid deployment of CICS applications for use in service providers and service requesters, with the minimum of programming effort.

When you use the Web services assistant for CICS, you do not have to write your own code for parsing inbound messages and for constructing outbound messages; CICS maps data between the body of a SOAP message and the application program's data structure.

Resource definitions are, for the most part, generated and installed automatically. You do have to define PIPELINE resources, but you can, in many cases, use one of the pipeline configuration files that CICS provides. These are:
basicsoap11provider.xml
Pipeline configuration file for a service provider using the SOAP 1.1 message handler.
basicsoap11requester.xml
Pipeline configuration file for a service requester using the SOAP 1.1 message handler.

The assistant can create a WSDL document from a simple language structure, or a language structure from an existing WSDL document, and supports COBOL, C/C++, and PL/I. It also generates information used to enable automatic runtime conversion of the SOAP messages to containers and COMMAREAs, and vice versa.

However, the assistant cannot deal with every possibility, and there are times when you will need to take a different approach. For example:
You don't want to use SOAP messages
If you prefer to use a non-SOAP protocol for your messages, you can do so. However, your application programs will be responsible for parsing inbound messages, and constructing outbound messages.
You want to use SOAP messages, but don't want CICS to parse them
For an inbound message, the assistant maps the SOAP body to an application data structure. In some applications, you may want to parse the SOAP body yourself.
The CICS Web services assistant does not support your application's data structure
Although the CICS Web services assistant supports the most common data types and structures, there are some which are not supported. In this situation, you should first consider providing a program layer that maps your application's data to a format that the assistant can support. If this is not possible, you will need to parse the message yourself.
If you decide not to use the CICS Web services assistant, you will have to:
The CICS Web services assistant comprises two utility programs:
DFHLS2WS
Generates a Web service binding file from a language structure. This utility also generates a Web service description.
DFHWS2LS
Generates a Web service binding file from a Web service description. This utility also generates a language structure that you can use in your application programs.
The JCL procedures to run both programs are in the hlq.XDFHINST library.