Cleo Transaction Designer and Transaction Processor

Improve efficiency, portability, and administration. Reduce development time.

Transaction Designer and Transaction Processor, together, comprise Cleo's Transaction-based Processing software suite. The suite offers increased application efficiency, enhanced application portability features, expanded system administration and the potential for reduced development and debugging time. And, underlying the new features is the same proven, high capacity, reliable communication software that Cleo’s customers have relied on for twenty years.

Transaction Designer

Cleo simplifies the task of building applications that require access to mainframe or midrange (host) data with its Transaction Designer. Developers can capture an entire set of host interactions and encapsulate them into transactions that can then be used from most development environments including VoiceXML (VXML), Visual Basic, Java, and .NET.

Transaction Designer is a Java based tool, which runs on a Windows desktop. It enables developers to access a host application, automatically record screens and keystrokes, and combine these into transactions using an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI). The transactions contain all the information necessary to interact with a set of host display screens (3270/5250). The capability to start and stop automatic recording of host screens is provided. Each recording clip includes a representation of the host screen contents, keyboard input and the AID key used to navigate to the next screen.

Key Features

  • Recording capability to run host emulators and record screens required for host navigation;
  • A display of recorded screens with input fields highlighted;
  • A means to create/modify host transactions for each transaction set, such as "Login," "Logout," "Recovery", "Park," or a user-specified name;
  • A means to save screen definitions and host transactions to files in a specific XML or VoiceXML format, for use by the Cleo Transaction Processor;
  • A “Validator” for testing the transaction once it is created.

Because of its ease of use, developers can construct complete transaction sets in a few hours rather than the several days required when using API interfaces. This simplifies the development process that in turn leads to reduced development time and higher reliability.

Transaction Designer provides the ability to test the transaction as soon as it's created through the “Validator”. The immediate testing of a newly designed transaction gives instant verification of a correct design and significantly reduces testing time. Once a set of transactions is created, it is published in XML format as a transaction set for later use by Transaction Processor. Although the transactions are created on Windows, the published XML transactions may be run on practically any operating system - Windows, Linux or Unix.

Transaction Designer Requirements

Transaction Processor

Transaction Processor is the run time module that manages all the host sessions and executes the stored XML transactions created with Transaction Designer. The Transaction Processor provides access to 3270/5250 mainframe data from a Java application, VoiceXML application, ActiveX applications such as Visual Basic 6.0 / .NET application, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro, or an ASP page. It can run on most major operating systems such as Windows 2000, Solaris and Linux.

Transaction Processor runs as a service on Windows and a daemon on UNIX. The user application invokes Transaction Processor functions provided in the software development kit through a Java, VoiceXML or ActiveX interface. When a transaction is run, the Transaction Processor uses the XML definition of the transaction to interact with the host server for accessing mainframe data. The transaction XML files were previously stored in the Transaction Sets directory by the Transaction Designer (TD).

Transaction Processor makes the initial host connection, pools all sessions, manages the pool of sessions, restarts “hung” sessions, executes individual transactions, and, in general, manages all issues required to keep all sessions active and communications flowing to and from the host.

The Transaction Processor Configurator and Administrative modules serve both as configuration and administration tools. The Configurator sets the options and resources required by Transaction Processor. The Administrator allows the user to view status of sessions and to view, search, and purge the log and statistics files.

Configurable Options

  • Auto Recovery – attempt to recover the session and get it back to a parked state once all user-defined recovery attempts have been made;
  • Time Out - the maximum amount of time to wait for a host screen;
  • Interlogin Gap - the number of seconds between startup and subsequent logins;
  • Maximum Recovery Tries - maximum number of user-defined recovery attempts;
  • Recovery Retry Intervals and Wait Time – maximum time a session can remain in one state before it is put into recovery;
  • Shutdown Time - time allotted for session startup or shutdown.

The Transaction Processor has several pre-defined functions for each customer’s environment. Functions that are already programmed in Transaction Processor include calls such as Reserve, AddInput, RunTransaction, GetOutput, Release.

Transaction Processor and Transaction Designer use Cleo's "Transaction-Based Processing" approach to application development. Transaction-Based Processing from Cleo creates, manages and uses high-level transactions. These transactions are stored and invoked from Voice XML, Avaya SAB, Nuance, Genesys GVP, Java and other application development tools.

The Cleo Transaction development kit is composed of:

  • A Transaction Designer (TD) - that records screens and creates transactions.
  • A Transaction Processor (TP) - that processes the transactions in real time and provides the basic API functions.
  • An Administration GUI - that provides a Configuration tool and an Administration tool for the Transaction Processor.

Transaction Processor System Requirements

View Transaction Designer / Transaction Processor PDF Brochure

View Cleo's flash video presentation on Transaction-based Processing.

For Self Service Architecture Applications, also read our White Paper: A Service-Oriented Architecture for the Self-Service Industry.