In some TIBCO Object Service Broker environments (CICS, TSO, z/OS batch), the concept of a communications area or COMMAREA is provided. This is a block of storage whose address is provided by the external environment and passed to the TIBCO Object Service Broker application program. Alternatively, the TIBCO Object Service Broker application program can obtain storage for use as a COMMAREA and pass a COMMAREA pointer to an external program. Multiple storage areas can be obtained for use as COMMAREAs; however, only one COMMAREA is active at any one time.
The System Interpreted Table @SESSION is used to obtain and manipulate COMMAREA pointers (sometimes called handles). If a COMMAREA is provided by the calling external environment, the value of @SESSION.COMMHANDLE is its address and @SESSION.COMMLENGTH is its length.
In the IMS environment three input and three output segments are provided and can be accessed using the pointer in @SESSION.SEG
nINHANDLE and @SESSION.SEG
nOUTHANDLE where
n is the segment number 0, 1, or 2.
In the Call Level Interface environment any number of input and output COMMAREAs can be passed in by the calling program and the list of pointers can be accessed using @SESSION.APIINHANDLE and @SESSION.APIOUTHANDLE.
TIBCO Object Service Broker for z/OS External Environments for information on the formats of COMMAREAS in the Call Level Interface environment.