Examining Dumps

Two kinds of abends, or abnormal terminations, are of interest to
CA InterTest for CICS users:

Abends in CICS during execution of a transaction
When this happens, you must examine the transaction dump associated with the abend to find any CA InterTest for CICS Work Areas (also known as CA InterTest for CICS Diagnostic Areas). The presence of such an area is a sure indication of CA InterTest for CICS monitoring. Only in this area can you find certain data about the program, such as the values of registers, that you will need to know.
Abends in CA InterTest for CICS transactions (CNTL, CORE, FILE, ITST, LIST, SYMD)
To understand why these transactions abend, you need to know how they work in CICS:
- CNTL and CORE transactions, when necessary, follow the chain of active CICS tasks and the chain of suspended CICS tasks to locate the task whose data is to be displayed, and any other tasks to which the CNTL command could apply. If a chain is damaged, these transactions will abend. Yet, the CICS system might be able to function for some time with these chains damaged, as long as the CICS software does not have to scan all the chains.
- CORE and FILE transactions are conversational, and can be defined so that they will abend if you take too long to respond with the next command.
- FILE transaction is simply a generalized application program, and it can abend in situations where the parameters you submit could not be checked sufficiently before the CICS command was issued. In most instances, CA InterTest for CICS does not attempt to check for the same things that the CICS software checks for, because such a duplication of effort would significantly increase the size of the CA InterTest for CICS software; even if those conditions were discovered by the CA InterTest for CICS programs, CA InterTest for CICS would have to issue the abend.