CA REALIA WORKBENCH CAPABILITIES?

[NIKOSK]

Hi,
does anyone know sth about CA REALIA Workbench capabilities regarding CICS development on a PC?

Is it possible with REALIA to develop an application at the PC without having any access to CICS (at least at the phase of developing and testing the programs?).

Does it include BMS creating and so on?

Can someone test with REALIA the "passing-retrieving data to COMMAREA"?
P.S. I tried the COMPUTER ASSOCIATES site's info but it has limited access to the documentation.

Thanks
Nikos

 

[mpc99]

We have been using Realia for all of our CICS COBOL development and testing for nearly 15 years. We make extensive use of COMMAREAs for interprogram communicaiton without any problems. The new workbench is not as easy to use (compared to the old DOS versions) for a mainframe oriented programmer, but it does work. It comes with a run-time environment and an indexed file system. The intereactive debugger is still one of the best and easiest to use.

The ease of testing will depend on the types of files that your CICS application uses. If it uses DB2 files, you will need to get a copy of DB2 for Windows ans install ODBC drivers for it. If it uses indexed files, you can load them into the REALIA file system with a REALIA batch COBOL program. The only thing you have to watch out for is signed display numeric data (e.g. S9(5)) on loading your files. Realia uses a different scheme for the sign nibble than the mainframe. We wrote COBOL program to handle the nibble conversion. Alternatively, you could unload it a sign trailing fields.