Re: Special characters -- RPG400-L

The newer GUI solutions certainly have a lot of curb appeal but not everyone is going there, at least not right now.

There seems to be a large gap between what we do for 5250 users and what we /can/ do for 5250 users.

So, I have been trying to make sure that I am aware of the 5250's enhanced features, and evaluate them to see if they are intuitive enough to be put in front of users. Check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, and drop down boxes seem, to me at least, to be a game worth the candle. Menu bars and push buttons, not so much.

Which brought me to the question of special characters. I am using "(F4)" to mark a field as having a dropdown box available. I was thinking that a special character might be a better signal, and use less real estate. The edit --> preferences --> keyboard special characters shows a down arrow and I was trying to figure out how to use that.

On 7/1/2013 5:33 PM, Vern Hamberg wrote:

It can also be kind of fun to use a macro like I just wrote that can enter a 3A on a command line, then type some more stuff, then press Enter - you get everything in blue.

You probably don't want to use 27 or 37! The 7 nybble is what makes it non-display. Actually those aren't destructive, just can be a little surprising.

Vern

----- Original Message -----
Be aware that, as pointed out above, some of those codes < x'40' are
treated as 51250 data-stream control codes. Including them in your screens
can cause the application to crash.

If you want to try it out (of course you do!), try displaying x'1D' - use a
hex editor to add it to e.g. a record in a source file and then use SEU...
Don't say I didn't warn you...

For those interested, here is the 5250 data stream definition:
http://publibfp.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/CO2E2001/CCONTENTS#15.0.
x'1D' is a Start_Of_Field order in the Write To Display command, and is
pretty much guaranteed to cause problems if it's not where it's supposed to
be in the data-stream.

Rory

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Vern Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

I have a macro that lets me enter any value from x40 - xFE (64 - 254) and
it will put that character where the cursor is. I purposely limited the
range - did it with the VBA way of writing a macro, as I recall.

Another way to get a macro to do any byte is to use the APL macro
statement - there's also an ANSI macro for, you guessed it, ASCII - I use
it to enter display control bytes.

I just made a modification of my "hex" macro using the apl macro - it
seemed to render normal EBCDIC. Now I did see that there's an APL keyboard
mode.

----- Original Message -----
Which special character(s)? I just tried it in my session -- I assigned
the "copyright" symbol to Alt-P, and it worked like a charm. You can also
do it with macros -- I've done that with the "degrees" symbol.

"RPG programming on the IBM i \(AS/400 and iSeries\)" <
rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

If I look at an EBCDIC Character Set chart I see non-keyboard
characters. Is there a way to display those characters on a 5250 green
screen? I opened the 5250 Edit --> Preferences --> keyboard item and
it shows some of the characters, and allows them to be assigned to a key
stroke, but , at least for me, it does not appear on the screen when
typed. However something does happen because when I close the member,
it warns me that there is an invalid character.

--
Booth Martin
802-461-5349
http://www.martinvt.com

Mike Naughton
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Judd Wire, Inc.
124 Turnpike Road
Turners Falls, MA 01376
413-676-3144
Internal: x 444
mnaughton@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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