Thank you all for your suggestions and help. I did not realize UIM was an alternative to DDS, or really what it was for until it was mentioned here. I have been reading up on it and testing it out a little today and I think it is definitely worth learning more about - I even found the half a paragraph in that document about imbeds (includes) after you indicated this was a possibility Mark; I really appreciate you pointing out this aspect!
I also appreciate the recommendations for making DDS work better for me. I was thinking of activating all of the function keys to avoid keyboard locking, so it may be reasonable to use the old copy-and-paste with some customizable header fields to create some standards. I would like to avoid the added complication of a precompiler if I can...
Thank you for helping me understand the options,
Sarah
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark S Waterbury
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2014 4:36 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Common Display File (Header + File-level Keywords)
Hi, Sarah:
Here is a link to "DDS for display files":
http://pc.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v7r1m0/topic/rzakc/rzakc.pdf
Here is a link to "Application Display Programming":
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v6r1m0/topic/rzakc/sc415715.pdf
To supplement what Vern suggested, you might want to pay particular attention to Part 3: Programming Application Displays using Panel Groups. This section of the manual describes how to use the User Interface Manager (UIM) -- this is what IBM uses internally for many of the display and "work with" panels you see in OS/400 or IBM i. It is a very different way to develop a user interface, compared with DDS display files. The screen layout is described with a "tagged" language, and it has sections that can be %included -- so this may be more to your liking, as you can develop your own "in house" standards, etc.
In addition to the above reference, I suggest you try to find a (used) copy of the book "Unleash the power of UIM" by Richard Schaler, (c) 1994 by MC Press. -- this has been "out of print" for some time and is hard to find, but perhaps you might get lucky and find a copy in a local library, or try using "inter-library loan"? It is written in more of a tutorial style, compared with the "reference manual" above.
Also, search for magazine articles by Carsten Flensburg and others, who have published various tools and utilities that use the UIM, as it really helps to have a "working example" to learn from, when learning to use UIM.
The way your program(s) will interact with UIM is closer to the way a web application interacts with a browser e.g. via a CGI interface, at least, conceptually. With UIM, you populate a number of "variables" in a "variable pool" and then you ask UIM to display a panel, and if the panel contains any "substitution variables" (it almost always does), it fetches the values of those "variables" from that dialog manager variable pool.
(If you have ever worked on IBM mainframes and used ISPF/PDF, then this concept should sound rather familiar.)
I hope this helps,
Mark S. Waterbury
On 1/29/2014 6:27 PM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:
Sarah - have you seen the "Application Display Programming" manual
from IBM? It would answer most of what you are asking, although it
might take you a while to get to each area.
But there are examples there of doing various things that might help you.
You are going from web to 5250 - the usual thing today is from 5250 to
web, and often parts of the 5250 screen are parceled out to index
tabs, say, to give better landscape.
Now it is possible to have windows overlay a screen, and those windows
can have the smaller bits or the things you would have had in tabs -
maybe that's a way to go - take your tabs and make DSPF windows of
those, then assign F-keys to make them be displayed over the main screen.
HTH
Vern
On 1/29/2014 5:05 PM, Sarah Kemp wrote:
Thanks for the explanation. In this scenario, is there a way to set the file-level keywords and available function keys in one file and use them across the whole application, or do their definitions need to be present in each display file? Is there some way to set these with RPG or do they have to be compiled in with the DDS?
Thanks,
Sarah
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