We were actually thinking along the lines of starting at the gui side. You draw a GUI for a screen and tell the components on the panel at which x,y locations on the 5250 they can find their info. The driver component of the GUI listens on the stream and triggers the gui panels when he finds the right screen info on the stream.
HTH,
Wim
| Pete Helgren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 14/10/2005 19:18
|
|
Well, not exactly sure how to describe it (although I have it in my head clearly...) And, I'll be the first to admit that I am not fully familiar with the architecture of tn5250j.
I am assuming you read a stream and figure out how to translate the fields and values into GUI components. Those components have a given ordinal relationship on the screen (X,Y locations) and then you place the GUI components in place of the text ones. A VERY simple example:
Let's say you have screen that has two fields, a static text field and a "text box", like so:
This is the text:
| this is the data |
So lets say the static text starts at 1,1 and the text box starts at 2,1. Although you are reading a stream, it eventually maps the entire screen to X,Y coordinates and that is how it displays on the screen. You could "save" these ordinal relationships to a file (kind of like SDA does) and then, through a GUI, allow the "designer" to move them to where they want them to go so, as in the above example, although the stream "says": Put static text field (STF1) in position 1,1 and put text box field 1 (TBF1) in positions 2,1, you could use the "saved" re-mapping file to tell the application to actually "paint" the controls to position 5,20 and 7,1 like so
This is the text:
| this is the data |
So all the "mapping" file would do is to save the original field positions and map them to new places on the screen. A GUI tool that captured the original positions and allowed the "designer" to move them to new positions would be needed to create and save the map file, and a map in memory of the original screen before it is mapped would probably be needed in order to send the data , updated with the changed data values, back to the iSeries in the correct sequence. But this is the general idea.
I think the Seagull screenscraper does something like this although I have no experience with that product and don't know the underlying technology at all. Maybe WebFacing is similar. But, conceptually, that is what I have in my head.
Pete
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
What exactly do you mean with the map file?
| Pete Helgren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 14/10/2005 16:48
|
|
Thanks Wim.
This sounds "exactly" like what I had in mind a couple of years ago. Seems to me that the "mapping" concept would be fairly straight-forward (probably a lot harder to do than it sounded...) This is very cool and Swing would be a good fit.
Have you looked at Java Server Faces at all? I saw a demo of a JSF app that looked very "Swing-like" but was all HTML and mostly a server side implementation. I have been meaning to take a look at it in more detail and see how difficult the coding is. The JSP/Struts/Tiles approach has always been too complex to me and JSF *seemed* to simplify that. I need to take a look at it soon but it might give you a richer-looking UI without the client side hassles of Swing. Mapping to JSF components might be a possibility. I'll look into it when I have a chance to see what you are doing.
One other idea I had in the "screen scraping" area was a "static" mapping option that would allow you to actually change the component layout at the client end. Rather than doing the transformation on the fly, you could create "map file" and use that instead. Not sure how to implement that though.
Thanks for the information on the code pages and the good news on the code page support in JT400. That should take care of it!
Look forward to hearing more about the screen scraper....
Pete Helgren
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hello Pete,
great to hear some acitivity from this corner.
The screenscraper works for one of our customers and is tailored to their screen layouts. Still have to do some bugfixes for them shortly, so I can send some screenshots on the list to give an idea to what it looks like. We were now discussing internally whether we were going to apply the scraper to our own screens, or build some kind of Swing gui components on top of the stream: a table for a subfile, a label for static text, a textfield for fields etc. The idea is to be able to build swing panels that read and write their data from the screen. The buttons and menu's would call function keys etc to do screen transitions and move to the next swing panel. What do you think? For us it is just to be able to quickly roll out GUIs until we find the time to reengineer the apps in full GUI apps.
The 1200 codepage is provided in JT400. However I can not find the 1208. I wonder however if those are supported if they're not in de toolbox. Or are the numbers provider here not the AS/400 numberings?
Regards,
wim
| Pete Helgren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 14/10/2005 15:41
|
|
Gee....been kinda quiet around here. Must mean we are all gainfully
employed and busy?
A couple of questions (just to blow the dust of the list!):
1. Wim, a while back you talked about a screenscraper project you were
involved in that used tn5250j components. Where are you on that? I'd
love to know what you are doing in that area since I think tn5250j has
some powerful tools in that would be useful.
2. Also, in general, how hard is it to add code page support,
specifically for 1200 and 1208? There was a post in midrange.com from
someone looking for an emulator that supported those code pages. I
didn't see it in the list of supported code pages (not in JT400
either). I'd like to help this guy out if I could, I just don't know
how difficult it is to support other code pages.
Thanks!
Pete Helgren
P.S. Kenneth are you out there ? How is it going?
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