Platform differences

The CICS® Foundation Classes, as described here, are designed to be independent of the particular CICS platform on which they are running. There are however some differences between platforms; these, and ways of coping with them, are described here.

Note: References in this section to other CICS platforms are included for completeness. There have been Technology Releases of the CICS Foundation Classes on those platforms.
Applications can be run in one of two modes:
fsAllowPlatformVariance
Applications written using the CICS Foundation Classes are able to access all the functions available on the target CICS server.
fsEnforce
Applications are restricted to the CICS functions that are available across all CICS Servers ( z/OS® and UNIX).

The default is to allow platform variance and the alternative is to force the application to only use features which are common to all CICS platforms.

The class headers are the same for all platforms and they "support" (that is, define) all the CICS functions that are available through the Foundation Classes on any of the CICS platforms. The restrictions on each platform are documented in Foundation classes reference. Platform variations exist at:
  • object level
  • method level
  • parameter level