Designing Screens › Screens and Templates Design › Screens

Screens

Screens embody the user's view of the system. Each online procedure step is associated with a screen.

A screen can contain fields, special fields, prompts and literals. It can also include one or more screen templates.

Besides providing anchor points for fields, prompts, literals, and special fields, screens have some properties of their own. Since each screen describes exactly one online procedure step, some screen properties are borrowed from the procedure step definition. For instance, screens do not have names of their own. They are identified by the name of the procedure step they support. They do not have their own descriptions, but assume the same description as the procedure step.

Only the properties shown in the following list are unique to a screen:

• Scrolling—This property, which may have either the value yes or no, indicates whether the user can scroll back and forth through a repeating group appearing on the screen using CA Gen's automatic scrolling feature.
• Help identifier—Online systems should be supported by help data.

  Many organizations have systems in place that support the capture and display of help text.

  The Help ID is used to tell the installation help system where to locate help text for the screen.

• Protection of unused occurrences—For screens that support repeating groups, this property is used to specify whether occurrences of the repeating group on the screen that were not populated in the procedure step's export view should be automatically protected.
• Positioning on a Dialog Flow Return—For screens that support repeating groups, this property is used to specify the occurrence of the repeating group that will be displayed at the top of the group. This happens after a return from a link type of dialog flow. There are two options:
  • Restore the position of the group to its position when the link was requested. For instance, if the 10th occurrence of the repeating group was displayed on the top of the screen when the link was requested, it will still be on the top of the screen after the corresponding return.
  • Reset the position of the group so that the first repeating group occurrence is displayed on the first line of the repeating group on the screen. For instance, if the tenth occurrence of the repeating group was displayed on the top of the screen when the link was requested, the first occurrence will be displayed on the top of the screen after the corresponding return. In practice, the second option is rarely used.

More information:

Repeating Groups and Automatic Scrolling

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