In this Issue
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President's Letter |
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Integrating Advantage CA-Ideal using HostBridge |
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Demo Dates |
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Tech Notes |
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President's Letter
We started HostBridge Technology in response to a challenge from a customer who wanted to be able to integrate their CICS BMS applications without screen scraping. That led to the development of HostBridge 1.0 and we have been responding to customer requests ever since.
Recently, a similar challenge was issued to us by Group Health Cooperative, a large health insurance organization based in Seattle, WA. Their environment included a mix of standard CICS application and applications written using Advantage™ CA-Ideal® for CA-Datacom® (Advantage CA-Ideal) . Their challenge was simple: "Do for Advantage CA-Ideal what you do for other CICS applications." In other words, provide access to existing applications through field names and values without screen scraping or changes to the written applications.
This newsletter outlines the solution we developed for GHC. Our solution is unique in that organizations can interact with their Advantage CA-Ideal applications using the field names from the panel definitions instead of relying on row/column coordinates. This solution saved the company the huge expense of rewriting the applications.
 Thank you very much for your interest in HostBridge Technology. Let us know if we can help solve your CICS integration problems.
Russ Teubner
Founder & CEO
Integrating Advantage CA-Ideal using HostBridge
Advantage CA-Ideal allows you to develop terminal-oriented applications for CA-Datacom quickly and easily. Each screen of an application derives from panel definitions that act as templates for screen layout. These panel definitions contain names for every input field, but these names are lost when Advantage CA-Ideal generates terminal output. HostBridge includes a panel processor that analyzes Advantage CA-Ideal panel definitions and extracts the names for each field in a panel. The basic architecture for Advantage CA-Ideal support appears below.
Figure 1. Advantage CA-Ideal architecture
Assume you need to access information contained on an Advantage CA-Ideal screen such as the one shown below.
Figure 2 . Sample Advantage CA-Ideal application screen
In the screen, notice the “HSII#” field with the value “______.” Figure 2 shows how HostBridge displays the CICS data in XML after an external application sends an HTTP request with the following format:
http://company.com:[port]/hostbridge?
HB_ENTRY=[transaction]&HB_FIELD_RENAME=1
In the URL above, the “port” is a port you assign to HostBridge under CICS Web Support (CWS) and “transaction” is the name of the transaction you want to execute. The HB_FIELD_RENAME command tells HostBridge to include the Advantage CA-Ideal panel field names in the XML output. For our purposes, assume the transaction name is “MGET.” Below is the HostBridge output sent back to the requesting application after executing the transaction.
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" ?>
<hostbridge sysid="TPT1" build_date="Mar 28 2005 10:56:06">
<token>3664ef41</token>
<timestamp>20050511211707</timestamp>
<status>
<response>0</response>
<desc>ok</desc>
</status>
<parameters>
<tranid>MGET</tranid>
<entry>mget</entry>
<userid>RACFUSR</userid>
</parameters>
<fields count="118">
<field name="P1HSII#" index="0">
<name len="8">P1HSII#</name>
<value maxlen="6" len="6">______</value>
<attr byte="40" justify="n" disp="y" prot="n" num="n"
int="n" mdt="n" />
</field>
...
<field name="P1MESSAGE" index="0">
<name len="10">P1MESSAGE</name>
<value maxlen="79" len="62">Consumer number 0000MGET
invalid, please enter a valid number.</value>
<attr byte="f8" justify="n" disp="y" prot="y" num="y"
int="y" mdt="n" />
</field>
</fields>
<cursor type="pos" pos="166" row="3" col="7">166</cursor>
<copyright info="HostBridge Copyright 20002005 HostBridge
Technology, U.S. Patent Pending" />
</hostbridge>
Figure 3. Sample XML output
The field names P1HSII and P1MESSAGE are the names that the Advantage CA-Ideal developers used when they created the application panels. HostBridge lets developers interact with Advantage CA-Ideal applications using these field names, not field locations on a screen. Therefore, if mainframe developers make changes to their applications by adding or removing fields on a screen, the changes will not affect web applications. This saves time and money for development staff and reduces the chances that users will receive errors when they access your web applications.
Advantage CA-Ideal continues to provide rapid development of mainframe applications. HostBridge allow companies with legacy applications built using Advantage CA-Ideal to protect their investments by integrating those applications with other enterprise applications. Using industry standards such as XML, SOAP, and JavaScript, HostBridge allows web developers to use existing skills and knowledge to build the integration framework, while shielding mainframe Advantage CA-Ideal developers from integration projects because HostBridge does not require changes to the legacy applications.
For more information, read our white paper "SOA and Web Services for Advantage CA-Ideal" and read the case study on Group Health Cooperative. Or, call us at 1-866-XML-CICS (965-2427).
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Tech Notes