Screen Scraping Application

Hi all,

I'm new to this tn5250, so please bear with me if I shoot stupid
questions =)

Basically, I want to create an application to get information from
AS/400 through TN5250 protocol. When I browse through the internet, I
found out about this tn5250. After browsing through the code and the
docs, my development team is lost =)

So, need your help to give some hints on how to use tn5250 from another
application. Basically, the application is a C application in Solaris.
If possible, I want to use tn5250 as a library to connect that
application to AS/400. Is this possible? Where should my team start
looking at the source? Is there any changes required in the tn5250
source? I prefer not to change anything in the tn5250 code.

To give more background, the application that resides in the AS/400 is a
very simple application. The AS/400 developer already creates an
application for my team, which requires very little screen interaction.
In fact, the "screen" is used only to receive data and to send data. So,
don't think of this screen as a "normal screen". The data itself will be
in the form of fixed-length format.

If done using a "true" TN5250 terminal emulation (I've tried this using
tn5250 running on Windows XP), this is what I do (human interaction):
1. connect to AS/400, using the workstation ID, user ID, and password
2. a blank screen will be shown
3. I type the data (example: "GET12345BAL", which means "Get (GET)
balance (BAL) for account number 12345") and press enter.
4. the screen will be changed to the reply message (example:
"GET12345BAL  135", which means the account balance is USD 135).

So, my application need to:
1. connect to AS/400
2. send the keystrokes with the appropriate format.
3. get the screen content to get the reply.

I've run through the archive of this mailing list (at least for the
recent message up until August 2002), and only found the following
related messages:
http://archive.midrange.com/linux5250/200210/msg00007.html
http://archive.midrange.com/linux5250/200209/msg00020.html

I can use any help or hints from this mailing list.

Regards.

- irving