Clear Screen Input

In general, import views of online procedure steps are populated from screens. However, in many cases it is desirable to provide a shortcut initial entry into a procedure by using Clear Screen Input. To illustrate, consider the Screen Containing a Repeating Group.

Ordinarily, a terminal user would need to complete the following steps in order to invoke the List Customers procedure at execution time:

The transaction code, assigned during Construction, is entered on the screen and the user presses Enter.
The screen associated with List Customers is displayed with no values in its fields.
The user keys in a value in the starting customer name field and presses Enter.
The screen associated with List Customers is displayed again. This time it contains customer names and phone numbers.

However, it would be more convenient for frequent users of List Customers to be able to enter the Trancode, followed by a value for Starting Customer Name on a clear screen. The screen associated with List Customers is displayed filled in with customer names and phone numbers. This is achieved using the Clear Screen Input feature.

The Clear Screen Input feature also allows the population of a procedure's import views if it is “flowed to” from a non-CA Gen generated transaction. By using the native facilities of the teleprocessing monitor, a non-CA Gen-generated transaction can send a message invoking a CA Gen-generated transaction, with parameters that map to the procedure step's import views.

You can only specify Clear Screen Input for the first procedure step in a procedure. A complete description of the specification of the Clear Screen Input feature is available in the Toolset Help.