Re: Navigator - Make it green screen and everyone will love it

Have to agree about sorting on multiple columns on 5250. Actually, IBM does something like it in WRKACTJOB, where you put your cursor in a column and press F16 - or in EDTF of an IFS folder - again, with your cursor in a column, it will sort on that column when you press F16.

I almost believe some developer had an enjoyable time coding those two interfaces!

Cheers
Vern

Hello Vern,

Am 27.02.2021 um 02:41 schrieb Vern Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Almost every new associate in our division is new to the platform, this will likely be true for every company that is actively using IBM i.

Mh, I again forgot that most guys here usually handle much bigger companies than I usually do. Mostly medium sized businesses, that is. I'm sorry.

In Germany (my home country), through my employments, I most often saw comparatively old machines, "true" AS/400's, and the context almost always was "replace", either in progress or to be started, soon. (The first and oldest one was a B30 - owned by a newspaper publisher for reckoning classifieds - to be switched off just some days before 2000, because the owner didn't want to invest into upgrades, and neither the OS nor the S/36 applications being run there were y2k-ready. Interestingly I had not the slightest interest in the platform back then.)

I know only two medium sized businesses in my area still actively using and not had planned to replace their IBM i machines. At least that was the case in around 2015..2017.

Now really, we have to get serious on this aspect - the printed output tool in ACS, well, how do you get all the sorting capabilities in WRKSPLF that you have in that ACS tool?

Besides the fact that it's somewhat unfair to compare a GUI table with eight concurrently visible fields to being crammed on a wrksplf (24x80) screen, it's truly rare to be able to have up to three different sort specs active at once in the GUI world. In fact, this is the first time I see something like that.

I'm astonished and I agree with you that this would be cumbersome to do. On a F-Keypress I'd show a pop up window with the column headings being listed, and input fields beside to allow entering the sort sequence order, and a flag for ascending/descending sorting.

I've done subfiles where you can press F11 to sort by the next field in a row, just like you click on the headings in many GUI tables, and get the output sorted by that particular field. To show the current sort field, I switch on DSPATR(UL) for the particular field's heading. Actual sorting is more easy with SQL, though. Having loads of LFs floating around to exploit the speed to load-paged subfiles is easily making me lose overview. :-) (Remember, oddball Hobbyist using the most likely slowest available RISC machine, 9401-150.)

:wq! PoC