Re: Flex & RPG

On 13/03/2010, at 7:37 PM, Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen wrote:

The ultimate problem with the 5250 is that there is no way around the
hardware limits of 80x24 or 132x27. If you found one, let me know.

Although the 5250 data stream only supports 2 screen sizes now there is nothing inherent in the architecture that precludes different or larger sizes. You'd just need a client that could render information in column 273 or row 86 or whatever. 3270 supports 4 sizes (24*80, 36*80, 43*80 and 27*132) and there's not much difference between 3270 and 5250 data streams.

I haven't tried it but I suspect that if you built your own 5250 data stream you could address beyond 27*132 and more than 256 input-capable fields. I'm reasonably confident this would work on the way out but I'm not so sure about on the way back.

In order for any such extensions to work you'd need to control the host application generating the data stream and the client rendering it.

However, your comment was prompted by a reference to RPG Open I/O and that has nothing to do with the 5250 data stream itself. It just allows an RPG programmer to deal with a non-terminal device in the same way as a terminal via READ, WRITE, EXFMT statements using a data structure. The components, probably from a vendor, plugged into the Open I/O interface will convert the data to a form appropriate for the current client device in a similar manner to how Workstation Function Management currently merges a record format and display file into a 5250 data stream.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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