Whenever you use CICSĀ® Configuration Manager to change (create, update, or delete) a resource definition, CICS Configuration Manager records the change in its journal. For each change, CICS Configuration Manager records the state of the resource definition before the change (before image) and the state after the change (after image). These before/after images are known collectively as historical versions. You can view, compare, and recover historical versions.
You can use the following two types of list panel to work with historical versions:
To display this list panel, select primary menu option 4.3 Historical Reports: CICS definitions. This option allows you to specify the criteria of the changes that you want to work with, such as the change date.
(The H line action is only available on some list panels of resource definitions.)
Identifying changes performed outside of CICS Configuration Manager
The journal contains historical versions of resource definitions only for changes made using CICS Configuration Manager. If you use another method to edit a resource definition, such as the CEDA transaction supplied with CICS, then the journal will not contain the version prior to that edit. For details, see Resource definition changes reported by CICS Configuration Manager.
If you have exclusively used CICS Configuration Manager to change resource definitions, and you have not unloaded records from the journal, then the before image of a change to a resource definition will match the after image of the previous change to that resource definition. If this before image and this after image do not match, it means that the before image represents a change performed outside of CICS Configuration Manager.
On the list panel displayed by line action H, the ID column for such historical versions contains the value "Unknown".