Re: Is it possible to have 2 display devices in one program? -- MIDRANGE-L

Booth,

The break message handling program is ideal for this purpose.

Imagine the following scenario:

Bob types:
Talk Alice
and presses enter

Window pops onto the screen, Bob enters message.

All that really happens is: SNDBRKMSG to Alice's terminal.

On Alice's terminal, rather than a DSPMSG, your break handling program grabs the message, formats it into a window, and pops it up on Alice's terminal *with a reply area*, and sets the target of the message back to the originator, in this case Bob. The original message can be quoted in the reply, as well.

Behind the scenes, Alice's program just does a SNDBRKMSG back to Bob.

Bob's break handling program is the same as Alice's - It pulls of the message, formats it for display, and pops the window with Alice's reply message at the top, and a place for Bob to reply below. Bob types his reply, and off it goes via SNDBRKMSG back to Alice.

In this way, conversation can go back and forth and back and forth.

One limitation is that only two people can converse. If you want more than two folks, then you have to create a mechanism for a list of folks to get together, like a channel on IRC.

Even if you don't like this model, the break handling program is just about the only way I know for one interactive job to interrupt another...

I dug up some old code (V2R3) that does this, but I don't think it's my code. It looks like it came from a Midrange Computing or Q38 magazine article. I don't know if it would be prudent to post it not knowing the copyright status...

At 12:23 PM 10/20/03, you wrote:

Actually, no.  That wouldn't be what I want to do.  I want a user able to
type "TALK UserName" and have the same subfile open on both people's screen.
 The called person would be interrupted, and would either continue the chat
or F3 the window closed.   The requirement is that both screens have the
same subfile, exactly.
---------------------------------------------------------

Booth Martin http://www.MartinVT.com

Booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx

---------------------------------------------------------

-------Original Message-------

From: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion

Date: Monday, October 20, 2003 12:10:26 PM

To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion

Subject: Re: Is it possible to have 2 display devices in one program?

At 11:32 AM 10/20/03, you wrote:

>"Care to share?" Sure, why not, but no laughing, ok? I would like to

>develop a TALK utility. Reaching another user for a casual question is not

>graceful. Obviously the phone or Instant Messenger will always be a better
>method, but sometimes you just need to ask a quick question and SNDBRKMSG
is
>not very graceful.

Ahh, what you need then is a break message handling program, not the funky

program that reads/writes screens to more than one machine. If specified,

this program runs whenever a message comes in. You can decide how to

format it, what to do with it and so on. What is real nice is that you can

prompt a response from the user, and TALK it back to the sender.

CHGMSGQ MSGQ(FOO)

PGM(MYLIB/MYPGM)

Take a look at the help on the PGM prompt and it will tell you what parms

get passed in.

It's been a long while, but my old one prefaced each message with a

constant, like 'TALK', and then handled those, but just did a DSPMSG on any
others.
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