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Channels and BTS activities

The PUT, GET, MOVE, and DELETE CONTAINER commands used to build and interact with a channel are similar to those used in CICS® business transaction services (BTS) applications. (For information about BTS, see the CICS Business Transaction Services manual.) Thus, programmers with experience of BTS will find it easy to use containers in non-BTS applications. Furthermore, server programs that use containers can be called from both channel and BTS applications. An example of this is shown in Figure 53.

Figure 53. Channels and BTS activities
The picture shows how a server program that uses containers can be called from both a channel and a BTS application.
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Context

As shown in Figure 53, a program that issues container commands can be used, without change, as part of a channel application or as part of a BTS activity.

For a program to be used in both a channel and a BTS context, the container commands that it issues must not specify any options that identify them as either channel or BTS commands. The options to be avoided on each of the container commands are:

DELETE CONTAINER
GET CONTAINER
MOVE CONTAINER
PUT CONTAINER

When a container command is executed, CICS analyzes the context (channel, BTS, or neither) in which it occurs, in order to determine how to process the command. To determine the context, CICS uses the following sequence of tests:

  1. Channel: does the program have a current channel?
  2. BTS: is the program part of a BTS activity?
  3. None: the program has no current channel and is not part of a BTS activity. It therefore has no context in which to execute container commands. The command is rejected with an INVREQ condition and a RESP2 value of 4.
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