Re: 5250 issue - Mochasoft does not respond to ne application

On 9/23/14 6:43 AM, Jeff Crosby wrote:

Isn't there a way in 5250 that an application can handle function keys or
ENTER or whatnot by a different method? Called the Aid byte or something
like that?

I wonder if that's how this app is written and that's why Mochasoft won't
work and Client Access does?

The AID code (I've heard it described as "Attention-ID," and I've found that it's usually [except, perversely, in the 5250 data stream manual] rendered as all-caps) is how (on ANY kind of read) the host program recognizes whether the user pressed a function key, or Enter, or Help, or Page Up/Down, or any of several other keys.

On the other hand, there are at least 5 distinct read commands in the 5250 data stream specification (and I think more were added after the manual was written). Some 18 years ago, we had a problem with WRQ's "Reflection" emulator (visually stunning, by the way) not working properly with our QuestView appliction. It turned out that Reflection wasn't handling the Read Input Fields command properly (the Read MDT Fields command is more common, since Read Input Fields is apparently only used by applications that build and parse the raw 5250 data stream directly), and we were able to work with WRQ to solve the problem, and it was fixed in their next release. (I think BOS's BOS-a-Nova may have had a similar problem, but they declined our assistance for reasons entirely their own.)

Ever since we began offering our own terminal emulator, I've occasionally found myself having to analyze a data stream we'd never encountered before, and weren't processing properly, and having to figure out how to deal with it. Almost always successfully.

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JHHL