Dealing with exception conditions

Every time you process an EXEC CICS® command in one of your applications, CICS automatically raises a condition, or return code, to tell you what happened. You can choose to have this condition, which is usually NORMAL, passed back by the CICS EXEC interface program to your application. It is sometimes called a RESP value, because you may get hold of it by using the RESP option in your command. Alternatively, you may obtain this value by reading it from the EXEC interface block (EIB).

If something out of the ordinary happens, you get an exception condition, which simply means a condition other than NORMAL. By testing this condition, you can find out what has happened and, possibly, why.

Many exception conditions have an additional (RESP2) value associated with them, which gives further information. You may obtain this RESP2 value either by using the RESP2 option in your command in addition to the RESP option, or by reading it from the EIB.

Not all conditions denote an error situation, even if they are not NORMAL. For example, if you get an ENDFILE condition on a READNEXT command during a file browse, it might be exactly what you expect. For information about all possible conditions and the commands on which they can occur, see the CICS Application Programming Reference manual.

This chapter describes:

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