Subject: SNA Service Transaction Names

From: "John E. Fetvedt (919-254-4366)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 95 08:13:38 EST

CIW General,

     Attached is a proposal to handle SNA Service Transaction program
names.  Please review it and send me your comments by Friday, February
24th.

     Thanks for your prompt attention.

     Cheers.

John Fetvedt

----------------------------- Referenced Proposal ---------------------------

Status:
-------

     The work item "Service TP Support" received Approved Direction (AD)
status at the 10/94 CIW.

     The CIW Technical Plan schedule proposes that Approved Pages (AP)
and Closed Pages (CP) status be granted at the 5/95 CIW.

Requirements:
-------------

     1. Allow a client program to specify an SNA Service Transaction
        name for its partner program's TP name.

     2. Allow a program to associate an SNA Service Transaction name
        with itself.

Problem:
--------

     1. CPI-C 2.0 defines the TP_name as a T61String.  A T61String does
        not include the EBCDIC characters X'00'-X'3F', which are used in
        the first character of an SNA Service Transaction name.

     2. CPI-C 2.0 states the TP_name will be automatically converted
        from the local system's native encoding to the transfer encoding
        where necessary.  However, the conversion, either to or from,
        the EBCDIC characters X'00'-X'3F', used in SNA Service
        Transaction names, is not defined.

Proposal:
---------

     Define new, specific encoding/decoding rules for the automatic
conversion of the TP_name field, when the field starts with a straight
single quote character.

     If the field starts with a straight single quote character, it must
also:

          1) contain a second straight single quote character,

          2) contain a non zero, even number of characters between the
             straight single quote characters

          3) contain only the characters 0-9, a-f, and A-F between the
             straight single quote characters (upper and lower case are
             equivalent).

     If the field starts with a straight single quote character and
     fails to satisfy any of the above rules, the call will be failed
     with a CM_PROGRAM_PARAMETER_CHECK return_code.

     *  When a TP_name field is received from the application,
             -  Release_Local_TP_Name
             -  Set_TP_Name
             -  Specify_Local_TP_Name
        any characters within the straight single quote characters are
        treated as hex representation and not subject to data conversion
        from the native encoding to EBCDIC, and any characters following
        the second straight single quote character are to be converted
        when appropriate.

     *  When a TP_name field is returned to the application,
             -  Extract_TP_Name
        any TP_name containing one of the special characters used in
        SNA Service Transaction names (X'00'-X'0D' and X'10'-X'3F') in
        the first character of the name, will be returned in hex
        representation between paired straight single quote characters,
        e.g. '21F0F0F6'.

     Note that a CPI-C implementation on an EBCDIC platform, that may
not currently look at the TP_name field because no automatic conversion
is required, would now need to check the field for a leading straight
single quote character and convert any hex encoding appearing between the
straight single quote characters.

Specific changes:
-----------------

     tbd

--------------------------- end of proposal ----------------------------