Setting shorter timeouts (e.g. 10th of seconds) in z/OS® client web enablement toolkit

The z/OS® client web enablement toolkit provides a set of application

programming interfaces (APIs) to enable traditional, native z/OS

programs to participate in modern web services applications.

In z/OS Client Web Enablement Toolkit you can use the options

HWTH_OPT_SNDTIMEOUTVAL and HWTH_OPT_RCVTIMEOUTVAL

to set a timeout for sending the request and receiving the response.

According to documentation timeout can only be specified in seconds

(up to 31 days).

Citation from handbook: “…An optional 4-byte integer to set a

particular timeout value, in seconds, … Valid range: 1 - 2,678,400

seconds...“

We have the requirement to be able to set the timeouts in a smaller

unit, for exapmple tenths of seconds.

With z/OS Client Web Enablement Toolkit we implemeted a REST API

to call any webervices from within our z/OS IMS and z/OS batch

applications. To avoid long queues in IMS and problems in the batch environment

we need the ability to control timeout settings in short time intervals.

For clarification:

With the today minimum setting of one second there is a potential risk

to get long queues in IMS with all transactions using our REST API.

Usually we have response times especially within IMS/DC below 0,15

seconds! With response times in the REST API from up to a second we

be afraid of bad side effects.

By setting a shorter timeout we will reduse this risk.