Repco Merchants

DataPipe

Project Brief
An existing system is in place to allow remote ordering from our branches via proprietary "Portable Data Terminals" to update our IBM mainframe. The existing process uses an ASCII 3270 terminal emulation to create the orders, a maximum of 4 at any time due to the physical limitation of 4 PC’s. Our problem is the poor reliability of the "Screen Scrape" method due to unexpected return messages and secondly the limitation of a maximum of 4 sessions.

IRIE solution
Designed and developed a GUI Windows based APPC program to operate the mainframe CICS/ESA transaction processor programmatically. The transaction to process the data is initiated by the Data Pipe program via APPC and the data pushed through from the PC environment.

Orders are now received, automatically posted with response returned to the IBM CICS/ESA mainframe application in “real-time” without session limitations and reliability has increased 100%. The application was written in C as a native windows program incorporating graphical displays and computer room error notification via inbuilt sound card.