Special considerations for generating EGL or SOAP services for z/OS® CICS®

Generating an EGL or web service to a z/OS® CICS® environment involves the following requirements:

  • Generation of services in CICS® requires CICS® TS for z/OS® 3.1, with APARS PK15904 and PK23547 applied.
  • Generation of services requires access to Hierarchical File System (HFS) on z/OS®:
    • The destDirectory build descriptor option will indicate the base directory on the HFS to use for deployment of a CICS® web service and of requesters.
    • For web service deployment, a subdirectory will be added to the directory named in the destDirectory build descriptor option; this subdirectory will be labeled "Provider", and a .wsdl file and a .wsbind file will be uploaded to the Provider subdirectory at preparation time. CICS® must have read and write access to this directory.
    • For web service client deployment, a subdirectory will be added to the directory named in the destDirectory build descriptor option; this subdirectory will be labeled "Requester", and a .wsdl file and a .wsbind file will be uploaded to the Provider subdirectory at preparation time.

The default transaction provided for CICS® web services is CPIH, which uses a Transaction Work Area (TWA) of 0 bytes. EGL applications require a minimum TWA size of 1024 bytes. To deploy your EGL-created applications, you must copy your CPIH transaction and modify the TWA size to 1024 bytes. Then the new copied transaction must be specified in the Transaction attribute of the protocol used for communication on CICS®.

You can indicate the URI path portion that the web service is deployed to. For example, consider the following web service location:
http://www.example.com/banking/BankService
The URI path refers to /banking/BankService. By default, the path is set to /services/webservicename, where webservicename is the name given to the service in the EGL deployment descriptor; or, if no annotation is set, then webservicename is the name of the service part. You can set the URI path in the web service entry by using the URI field in the EGL deployment descriptor.

Restrictions

The following restrictions apply when developing services that will be deployed in a CICS® environment:
  • Third party WSDL files containing "use=encoded" SOAP bindings are not supported and cannot be used to create CICS® web service clients.
  • Parameters of type "dbchar" are not supported in CICS® web services.
  • Function overloading is not supported in CICS® web services.

For further information

For further details, see Generating and deploying a web service to CICS®.