This delivery will cover a Transaction Abend resulting in an ASRA abend code issued by CICS.

I will discuss the layout and description of the relevant parts of a Transaction Dump and explain the important pieces of information.

I will discuss how to interpret the information and use it to locate the failing statement in the COBOL Program. I will analyse what situations can cause a Program interrupt such as an S0C4 and an S0C7. The statement will be located in the COBOL program and the Working Storage elements in the failing instruction will also be found in the dump. I will cover the 4 items that are needed to locate these data items, such Base, Displacement, Length and Picture clause.

I will then relate this information back to the dump and use the dump information to find these Working Storage areas.

In addition, I will explain the role of a Save Area that every task must follow and how to interrogate a CICS Trace and use this Save Area information to determine how to locate the last time that the Process left the Program. I will also show how to use the Trace and the Save Area to find any API command in the program and its statement number.

Colin Pearce is a z/OS Systems Programmer and CICS/TS Systems Programmer of 30 years. Mainframe Training and Software support.