Concept of pointers in CICS

dharmendra_kp · New User Joined: 10 Mar 2005 Posts: 33 Location: Lewiston

Hi all,
I have just come across an old complecated CICS program which uses pointer extensively. I have to ananlyse the program, extract business rules, modify or replace some of the fuctionality to UNIX platform JAVA, etc...

I need to know everything about the concept of pointer. Please explain and or provide relevant link, documents.

Thanks and regards

dharmendra_kp · New User Joined: 10 Mar 2005 Posts: 33 Location: Lewiston

Actually it involves not one but set of programs LINKED or XCTLed DFHCOMMAREA is defined something like this:

01 DFHCOMMAREA
05 WS-DFHCOMMAREA-COM S9(08) COMP
05 WS-DFHCOMMAREA-PNTR REDIFINES
WS-DFHCOMMAREA-COM POINTER.

The content of the DFHCOMMAREA appears to contain set of POINTERS to another set of structures. etc.......

dineshness · Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 12:18 am

Your question is not quite clear.

If you are in need of understanding the concepts of POINTER then any COBOL book would explain your doubts.

Or, if you want to understand the concepts of COMMAREA, refer some of the CICS books from this site.

Dinesh.

cooldebi · New User Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 18 Location: mumbai

Hi,
POINTER is generally used to refrence variable VIA it's memoryaddress instead of using variable name. They are usually used to manipulate data by doing operations at their address.

Please try this link to see cobol pointers;

http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/handheld/Connected/BOOKS/igy3lr10/5.3.16.8?ACTION=MATCHES&REQUEST=pointer&TYPE=FUZZY&SHELF=&DT=20020920180651&CASE=&searchTopic=TOPIC&searchText=TEXT&searchIndex=INDEX&rank=RANK&ScrollTOP=FIRSTHIT#FIRSTHIT

Thanks