Re: Display file attributes

[Douglas Handy <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Paul,

> Nope, don't want to mess with API's or anything like that. I'd just like
> IBM to put a button on the tool bar or as an action to toggle the
> attribute bytes on and off.

You can easily add a toolbar item which runs an application, so if the
EHLLAPIs let you modify non-input capable display bytes (like the
original 5250 emulation did), then it would be trivial to create a
very small VB or VC (or VARPG?) program which would do it for you and
you'd just add it to your toolbar.

My point was simply that you may not have to wait for them to add it. 
You've been waiting what, 10 years?  It didn't take me long at all to
find the API docs, look at some IBM sample code, try it out and
discover the APIs are restricted to modifying input capable positions.
 It took maybe 15 minutes tops to find that out.

If it would have worked, I could have just made a small program for
you to add to your toolbar and you'd have the solution tonight.  I
think too often the term API is associated with some mystic, secret
decoder ring club that is hard to belong to.  It isn't -- all it means
is that IBM has done all the dirty work for you and created a series
of function calls to extend the language.

Alas, in an attempt to keep from shooting yourself in the foot, the
APIs are doing some safety checks and won't allow you to alter the
display attribute bytes directly.  So I suppose adding the feature to
the TN5250 project may be the simplest solution.

Doug

PS - I just had another idea.  You can use SETATNPGM to call a small
program which would use the DSM apis to read the current screen
contents, replace each attribute byte with a @ or whatever, and update
the display again.  This would then work from any dumb terminal or any
emulator.  You could then wait for an AID key then exit the program to
return to the original screen contents.  Or if Enter was pressed
instead of F3 or F12, use the cursor position as a request to display
the actual attribute byte value or whatever.