IMS™ or CICS® ECI transactions are often written in COBOL, C, or PL/I languages. If you are coding Java™ applications to access these transactions using J2C resource adapters, the Java application needs to serialize values from Java to the type of byte buffer that the IMS or CICS program expects. The importers are tools that deliver this data mapping. Once you import a COBOL, C, or PL/I file into your project, you can work with this data as you would with any data construct.
Preferences for the importers can be selected in two ways: