The service requester

A service requester is the application that is looking for and invoking or initiating an interaction with a service.

The requester role can be played by a browser driven by a person, or a program without a user interface, e.g. a Web service. A service requester issues one or more queries to locate a service and to determine how to communicate with that service.

At run time, a service requester is looking for and invoking an interaction with the adapter service that has been deployed to the CICS® Service Flow Runtime. The following table lists the supported interfaces that a service requester can use to pass in the message header and application data.

Service requester type Interface used
WebSphere® MQ-enabled application WebSphere MQ-CICS bridge.

This product serves as the interface between an WebSphere MQ-enabled service requester and CICS. The request message is passed in a WebSphere MQ message to a WebSphere MQ message queue.

Non-WebSphere MQ applications A CICS-supplied interface, such as EXEC CICS LINK, EXCI or ECI.

The IBM® CICS Transaction Gateway (CTG) product.

Examples of service requesters could be any of the following applications:

What the service requester is responsible for

The service requester is responsible for the following aspects of business transaction processing at run time:
  • Managing the overall business flow, including passthrough processing if used, and compensation.
  • Managing business context, complex state, multiple requests and replies, and asynchronous request processing.
  • Overseeing the continuation of one logical request through multiple requests, if required.
  • Adhering to a published XML message format when creating valid XML request message for passthrough processing. See XML request and response processing for passthrough.
  • Performing data conversion if required. See Data conversion for information on how to perform data conversion.

If you want to implement a passthrough deployment type to process requests from the service requester, you must program the service requester to handle the passthrough response, one screen at a time.

For passthrough processing, the service requester is responsible for interpreting the application data structure (ADS) and based on its interpretation, taking appropriate action in the language of the service requester.