Natural Under CICS

Hello,

Currently Natural is running under CICS MRO region.

The users of the system don’t want to get into Natural development environment and Execute the Natural user Application/Natural Program.

Need help to Invoke the Natural User Program in CICS without invoking/getting into Natural development Environment. (for e.g., I need to create Transaction (Trans ID) in the CICS, which should invoke the natural program by invoking the Natural runtime in the background.).

What are all setup processes / entries I need in the CICS to execute the natural user program directly by entering the 4 character transaction ID in CICS.

Need the parameters information for PPT/PCT to define the transaction.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Hi Mukunthan,

You cannot get around invoking the CICS transaction for the Natural run-time. However, I assume this is about the user experience, not a particular way in which you believe it should be done. I believe what you really need is something that will allow your production users to execute Natural code without needing to know how to navigate around the development menus.

This is typically accomplished by having startup programs defined to the Natural Security definitions for your users such that a main menu program of some kind is invoked, and then your users can navigate an easy-to-use menu instead of having to deal with the NEXT prompt.

If this user just needs to run this one program only, you could make it the user’s startup program.

Brian’s suggestion of adding STARTUP=appmenu to the users’ NatParms is a good way to go. (Replace appmenu with the Natural program name of your choice.) An alternative is STACK=appmenu. Neither parameter requires Natural Security to be in place.

Look to the documentation for differences in the way STARTUP and STACK affect the user session.

There are other options: use a Natural front-end program to pass user and/or transaction specific appropriate dynamic parameters. user then really needs to enter a transaction code (associated to the NAT front-end program) and is routed to the requested Natural application.
Pls see docu on various techniques of NCI front-end programs (XCTL/LINK/START/RETURN); NCI front-end programs together with back-end logic are a powerful technique also to imbend Natural into a ‘menu’ system, where an end-user even never seens the plain CICS surface, i.e. has no need to enter transaction IDs at all.

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