7. Writing Field-developed Applications › 7.1 Development Steps

7.1 Development Steps

A CA MICS product is a processing entity that fits into the
normal update flow of the CA MICS system. It processes
approximately one day's worth of data from some source and
creates a single cycle of one or more CA MICS database files
to complement the rest of the CA MICS database.

A field-developed application (FDA, or user-written product)
treats some input source of special interest your site,
assures the applicability and integrity of the data, formats
the data to be compatible with CA MICS, and stores the data
on the CA MICS database.

Defining an FDA through CA MICS facilities relieves you of
most of the chore of coding the product's code.  That is,
defining a CA MICS FDA through CA MICS Component Generator
(MCG) statements allows the MCG to generate SAS logic that
defines the content of the files in each timespan in which
each file is supported, summarizes all files to succeeding
timespans, and ages the cycles of all timespans for all
files in the product.

To define a product to CA MICS, you must:

    1.  Determine what you need the product to do
        - what is its input source?
        - what reports do you need from the product?
        - what files organize the information for reports?

    2.  Write the code
        - write the product definition (fdaGENIN)
        - write the input format routine (DYfdaFMT)
        - write the reports (MICF inquiries, DYfdaMBO, and/or
          DYfdaEXC and fdaEVA)

    3.  Test and implement the code
        - run the CA MICS generation jobs
        - test the product's processing and reports
        - write documentation
        - turn over to production status

In this chapter, the principles of writing a field-developed
application are illustrated through the development of two
FDAs, the UNP and ZTM products.

o  UNP processes a simple SMF record that contains data
   describing activity on a 3705 processor.

o  ZTM processes the TYPE50 SAS data set, created by MXG from
   the SMF type 50 record (VTAM Tuning Stats).

Note:  ZTM is developed using the CA MICS-SAS Interface (MSI)
       which even further shortens the FDA development cycle.