Configuring a Listener

A Listener configuration is made up of the region name and the name of an associated database server instance. Once the name and database server instance are specified, one or more channels can be associated with the region. A channel is made up of a logical name, a protocol, and a port number.

For example, in the listener configuration for a region you could define a channel named TN3270, to use the TN3270 protocol on port 9023. This would enable 3270 terminal emulators to connect with the region on port 9023. With TN3270 listeners, you can use the keep-alive functionality to check that the listener is active, and to ensure that it stays alive.

A listener configuration file can include multiple regions, each with multiple channels.

Currently supported protocols are TN3270 for TN3270 terminals, and MFBINP.

MFBINP is an internal Micro Focus protocol. This protocol is used to:

monitor the JCL jobs submitted from Enterprise Server for .NET to a native Enterprise Server region.
submit JES jobs to a Enterprise Server for .NETJES region

Listener configurations are stored in the listener configuration file seelistener.exe.config

Note: The default installation has a listener defined for the CICS ESDEMO region, defined on port 9023. You can use this listener to verify the installation. This configuration is not overwritten if you need to re-install the software.

The default seelistener.exe.config file installed in the same location as seelistener.exe is overwritten when the product is re-installed. However, seelistener.exe also looks for a version of seelistener.exe.config in %APPDATA%\Micro Focus\SEE\8.0\Config and will use it if present. This version is not overwritten when the product is re-installed.

Setting the heartbeat

With TN3270 channels, you can configure an optional "heartbeat" or keep-alive feature.

With the heartbeat feature, you configure a time interval in seconds. For idle conversations, the listener sends test messages at the configured time intervals.

Note: Heartbeat configurations are ignored with channel types other than TN3270.

The test messages that this functionality generates have two functions:

They check that the client is still available.
In an environment that closes idle conversations, the test messages ensure that the conversation remains open.

When starting a listener from the command line, you can specify a default heartbeat with the seelistener.exe command using the -heartbeat:time option. You can also configure heartbeats for individual channels defined in the seelistener.exe.config file, by adding the heartbeat="time" attribute to the <channel> element. Set time as a value in seconds.

You can add, edit, or remove heartbeat parameters from channels when editing a listener configuration file in the Administration snap-in.

To remove a heartbeat, set its value to 0.