Re: Scrape 5250 to 5250 with help from DSM?

Darren,

If you hadn't said "I think I'm almost to completion on a project to scrape 5250 screen data" and if you were familiar with Java or had access to someone who was, I would have pointed you to the tn5250j open source project that basically built an object oriented 5250 browser. It has a 5250 protocol bean that is particularly useful for this kind of stuff (I used it for the web5250 project). Though this post is OT from your particular post, I stuff it in here so that if you come to a dead halt, or want an alternative approach, you could check out tn5250j and work with some Java experienced person in your shop (if you have one) to wrap it in RPG.

One option if you get completely stuck.

Pete Helgren

darren@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Question first:
Is it possible to use the DSM API's to interact with a buffer that is not
actually attached to an active 5250 session? I see lots of talk about
buffers in these API's, and I'm wondering if it would be legal to pass 5250
data back and forth to a buffer in these API's but to not have a terminal
screen to display it. Things like the 5250 SAVE SCREEN and RESTORE SCREEN
functions are of particular interest.

Background:
I think I'm almost to completion on a project to scrape 5250 screen data,
as its generated in another virtual session, interpret that in a local
application, and respond back. To do this, I'm using the Virtual Terminal
API's, ie. QTVOPNVT) My reasoning is to alter the interface to a 3rd party
ERP package, without access to the source.

Things have gone pretty well. My service program returns a picture of the
screen as its parsed from the 5250 datastream, and then I send a response
back. I've run into an issue with the SAVE SCREEN and RESTORE SCREEN
commands. Since I don't have the actual screen rendered anywhere on a 5250
screen, its difficult to respond to these requests. It would also be nice
if there was a more structured way of interpreting the screen, rather than
parsing through the raw 5250 stream as it comes out of QTVRDVT. I'm hoping
that DSM might help with this too. But, I'm not familiar enough with DSM
to know whether its smart enough to work on a virtual buffer, rather than a
real 5250 interpreter.