RE: Update to TNAPI progam

O.k., tell me if this is a fit (I have come up against this several times):

We have a rather large interactive program with complex logic (you know, the
ones whose author is long gone and for which there is no documentation), in
this case, an order delivery posting program.  A new program was written for
this client in their HazMat application, and this new program is where
deliveries will be recorded.  Instead of duplicating the human effort in the
older application's posting program, it would be ideal if we could feed it
the data as if a human were entering it in from the data that is collected
in the new HazMat program.

Once upon a time, I took an existing interactive program, defined but never
opened the Workstn file, no-op'd all the Workstn format reads & writes, and
replaced those with data fed from a new input data file.  It worked, but was
not something I'd like to do on a regular basis.

Dan Bale
SAMSA, Inc.
989-790-0507
DBale@SAMSA.com <mailto:DBale@SAMSA.com>
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-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
[mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of York, Albert
Sent: Friday, June 14, 2002 12:33 PM
To: 'midrange-l@midrange.com'
Subject: RE: Update to TNAPI progam


Dan,

TNAPI is an API which you call to communicate with the AS/400 through a
telnet session. You specify the data that you want to be "typed", including
cursor positioning (TAB,  right arrow, etc), and a function key (ENTER, F3,
etc). The resulting screen is returned to your program as a 1920 character
variable. In addition, you can specify a "wait" string, in which case TNAPI
will wait until that string appears on the screen (in the position
specified) before returning.

TNAPI can be called from a batch program, as long as TCP/IP services are up.

As an example of it's use, I recently had to recreate a bunch of queries
because of a file change. For some reason, the AS/400 does not have a
command to recreate a query, it can only be done interactively (the
System/38 did have such a command). With TNAPI it was a piece of cake.

Albert