Interacting with the IMS Transaction Manager

A Java™ application interacts with the IMS™ Transaction Manager (IMS TM) to run an IMS transaction, to retrieve undelivered or asynchronous output messages, to retrieve and respond to an IMS callout request, or to invoke any of the IMS commands that are supported by IMS Open Transaction Manager Access (OTMA).

Java applications that run non-conversational IMS transactions are the most common type of Java applications that use the IMS TM resource adapter. To run a non-conversational transaction, the Java application interacts with IMS TM through IMS Connect, passing the input message of the transaction to IMS TM and accepting the output message from IMS TM in return.

In the Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA), this interaction is done using an instance of the Interaction object. The Java application interacts with IMS by invoking the execute method of an Interaction class, providing the input message of the IMS transaction and an IMSInteractionSpec object. The IMSInteractionSpec class in the com.ibm.connector2.ims.ico package describes the properties of the interaction.

The properties of the IMSInteractionSpec class determine the type of interaction that a Java application has with IMS TM. Interactions take place in a transaction pipe (tpipe), which is a logical connection between an OTMA client, such as IMS Connect, and the server, IMS OTMA.

You can configure an IMSInteractionSpec object in your Java application to invoke the execute method of an Interaction object in several ways:

• By using the wizards of an integrated development environment (IDE) to generate Common Client Interface (CCI) code for the Java application. In this case, the values for the properties of the IMSInteractionSpec class are provided to the wizards and the CCI code is generated for you.
  Recommendation: Use this method to develop your application because the skeleton code is generated for you.
• By coding a Java application that directly calls the Common Client Interface of the IMS TM resource adapter. Use the set methods to configure an IMSInteractionSpec object and invoke the execute method of an Interaction object.
• By using a variation of the code-generating IDE model in which the properties of IMSInteractionSpec are dynamically provided at run time. This method is typically referred to as exposing the properties of the IMSInteractionSpec (or IMSConnectionSpec) object as data.