Is Telon Loadlib a required allocation

Products

• Telon Application Generator

Issue/Introduction

We have some clients who are reporting that they are not using TELON anymore but we see the loadlib in the allocations for some of their regions.

Taking the allocation out might cause an outage so we are hesitant to do that Is there some way to tell if there is anything left in a CICS/IMS/DB2 region that requires the Telon Loadlib?

 

Environment

Telon® Application Generator

Resolution

We are not aware of any way they can tell if they still need the Telon load library allocated to their regions. If they use the TDF in any of them, they most certainly do. But as for end-user programs, their necessity would be depend on a number of factors, such as:

• Are they running any Telon-generated programs in the region? As a test, you can do a ISPF 3.15 search on a load library that contains both TDF and Telon-generated programs for "Telon".
  
  
• Were the Telon subroutines (abend routines, field edits, etc.) hard-linked into their programs or not? (The default for Telon programs is to hard- link, with the exception of the secondary abend subroutines (ADCCABT, ADICABT, etc.) for ABNORMALT 2 and 3 ) which are dynamically called.
  
  It is possible, however, to force dynamic linking of all external subroutines via the LINKDYN switch in the TLNIIS macro used to generate the program.)
  
  
• If they check the PGMNAMES macro used by each group, and the programs they generated, they may be able to determine the naming convention for each group's programs. The names are made up of header and ID (which each could be from one to five characters), as well as a possible add-on to the header and a possible APPLID. For example, the TDF screen programs (which are generated by Telon) have a header of TN, an add-on of CP for the CICS TD and TM for the TSO TDF, and an ID, leading to program names such as TNCPF100 and TNTMD141.

Additional Information

If you have Telon programs running in a region, and if those Telon programs use external subroutines that are dynamically called rather than hard-linked into the program, the loadlib is needed in the startup deck. A S806 abend will result if a dynamically-called load module is not found at runtime. If all the Telon subroutines are hardlinked in, the Telon loadlib is not required to be included in the CICS startup JCL.