CICS Troubleshooting

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ASRA transaction abend

ASRA is the CICS program-check abend — the online equivalent of S0C7/S0C4: the task touched bad data or a bad address.

What it means

ASRA fires when a CICS task suffers a program check (data exception, protection exception, etc.).
CICS catches the hardware interrupt and abends the task with ASRA instead of crashing the region.

Common causes

Same family as S0C7/S0C4: bad numeric data, wild subscript, bad pointer in the application program.
COMMAREA length mismatch: the program reads past the data it was given.
Storage overlay from a previous bad MOVE.

How to diagnose

Get the CICS transaction dump; the PSW and registers work like a batch dump.
Check the CSMT log for the ASRA entry and the original program-check code.
Map the offset to the compiler listing.
Verify COMMAREA lengths between the caller and the program.

How to fix it

Fix the underlying data or addressing bug as for S0C7/S0C4.
Correct COMMAREA length agreements between programs.
Add validation of input data at the transaction entry point.

Example: Check COMMAREA length on entry

IF EIBCALEN = 0 EXEC CICS SEND TEXT FROM("Missing input") END-EXEC EXEC CICS RETURN END-EXEC END-IF. IF EIBCALEN < LENGTH OF WS-INPUT-AREA *> handle short commarea, do not read past it END-IF.

Never trust the COMMAREA length — verify EIBCALEN first.

Interview tip

Q: How would you troubleshoot a ASRA transaction abend in production?
A: I would pull the transaction dump, identify the original program-check code from CSMT, map it to the listing, and fix the data or addressing bug — checking COMMAREA handling first.

Prevention checklist

Validate all transaction inputs.
Keep COMMAREA layouts in shared copybooks.
Test with bad-data cases.