Re: Pete's web5250

For those that were curious and want to learn more about the Virtual
Terminal API's you can find them here (I had to dig a little):

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=/apis/vt1a.htm

The limitation in all of this in my mind is DSPF DDS specs. If they were
in some way "extensible" then new UI components (read syntax) could be
introduced and then be acted upon for data I/O. Can anybody think of a
way they could be extensible?

One thought would be to have a single generic DSPF that all programs use
just for something to write to and read from but outside of that all data
I/O could be done through another medium like special files (thanks for
the introduction to these Jon Paris :-) or some other API calls.

For example, before you invoked the EXFMT in your interactive RPG program
you would write all of your screen data to a holding place where the
renderer (in this case web5250) could grab it and push it out to the UI in
the appropriate form. A separation like this would lend itself nice to
"building for change" as I am sure there will be many more UI's to come in
the future (i.e. today we have Flex and Silverlight and tomorrow xyz).

pseudo code:

/free

webICCD = ui_getSelected('item_code_dropdown');

setll key ITMCD;
reade key ITMCD;
dow not %eof(ITMCD);
ui_addDataList('item_code_dropdown': ICCD: webICCD);
reade key ITMCD;
enddo;

...

EXFMT GENERIC;

select;
when keyPressed=F3;
//do something
when keyPressed=F4;
//do something
endsl;

....

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com

Nathan Andelin wrote:

From: Thorbjo/rn Ravn Andersen
I am unfamiliar with the term "virtual terminal interface".
Is it a telnet server or a completely different beast?



I don't think very many developers know much about the virtual terminal interface. IBM hasn't published much information about it. There's some documentation at the IBM i Information Center. It's the interface that many of the screen-scraper vendors use. It provides for a native IBM i middleware server in between a green-screen application and whatever client is on the other end of the conversation.

Your server in the middle therefore has the opportunity to transform the 5250 data stream to some other format.

Nathan.