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Asked: 2026-05-28T18:08:57+00:00

I’m using CICS in Cobol program and I’ve noticed that sometimes data are written

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I’m using CICS in Cobol program and I’ve noticed that sometimes data are written out of the CICS memory. It cause a data corruption and my application stop. I don’t know where it append, so I’m creating a parser to analyse my Cobol code to look for possible corruption in COMMAREA used by CICS. Now I checked following statements :

EXEC CICS XCTL
EXEC CICS LINK
EXEC CICS RETURN TRANSID

For each, I check if sent length (declared in LENGTH parameter) is not greater than sent COMMAREA. Then I check if DFHCOMMAREA, in the receiving program is not greater than sent COMMAREA (according to this doc http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/cicsts/v3r1/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.cics.ts31.doc%2Fdfhp3%2Fdfhp37t.htm) :

The receiving data area need not be of the same length as the original communication area; if access is required only to the first part of the data, the new data area can be shorter. However, it must not be longer than the length of the communication area being passed. If it is, your transaction may inadvertently attempt to read data outside the area that has been passed. It may also overwrite data outside the area, which could cause CICS to abend.

Now, I’m wondering what other things should I parse in order to detect memory overwritting?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    When a CICS program starts writing all over memory it will not only “stop working” but possibly
    crash the CICS region as well!

    If you are sure that the LENGTH is set properly on LINKs and XCTLs and that you are
    receiving the COMMAREA into a linkage record of that size (EIBCALEN), then you should
    be fine.

    Rather than trying to parse your COBOL programs I suggest that you set compiler
    bounds checking options on. The problem you are having is most likely related to
    indexing or subscripting beyond the bounds of a working storage table. Attempting to detect
    this class of programming error through static analysis is generally not very
    effective.

    Setting bounds
    checking on should detect out of range memory references, issue a diagnostic message to
    the log, and then and terminate your program
    before it crashes the whole CICS region. The logged message should point you the the
    source line where the out of bounds reference occured.

    Check out the SSRANGE compile time option. Make sure it is set and that your CICS region
    runs LE enabled programs with CHECK(ON).

    This should nail out of bounds memory
    references pretty quickly.

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