Designing Dialogs › Procedure Definition and Dialog Design › Create Procedure Steps › Define Clear Screen Input

Define Clear Screen Input

When you invoke the first procedure step associated with a screen, Clear Screen Input lets you pass unformatted input to the procedure without displaying its empty formatted screen. However, you cannot pass unformatted input to procedure steps without screens.

To enter unformatted input on a clear screen, you must enter a transaction code followed by a list of parameters separated by the appropriate string and parameter delimiters. Business System Defaults contain the string and parameter delimiters defined for your system. By entering this data, you specify how the dialog manager of CA Gen will interpret the data that follows the transaction code on clear screen execution and will pass that data to the import views of the procedure step. The transaction code is required by teleprocessing monitors (for example, IMS and CICS) to identify the programs required to execute the procedure step.

The Clear Screen Input option can help you reduce execution costs and time by providing a short cut to invoking and using a procedure. In addition, experienced users can employ this option to allow a program generated outside CA Gen to access a program generated using CA Gen software.

The parameter list can be defined by keyword. Keywords are labels that identify the parameter and must be accompanied by the parameter data enclosed in delimiters.

Example:

<trancode> NAME'John Doe',NUMBER'123-45-6789'

<trancode>

Identifies the transaction code, single quotes represent the string separator

comma (,)

Identifies the parameter delimiters

Note: NAME and NUMBER are keywords. If spaces are not selected as the parameter delimiter, they are ignored in the clear screen input data stream.

The keyword can be the prompt that accompanies the field on the screen with which the procedure step is associated or some other label that can be associated with the field. All keywords must be unique. When you use keywords, the parameters entered at a clear screen need not be in the same order as the parameter list defined for the screen.

For example, the following two clear screen inputs are acceptable:

<trancode> NAME'John Doe',NUMBER'123-45-6789'
<trancode> NUMBER'123-45-6789',NAME'John Doe'

Keywords are case sensitive and cannot contain delimiters. However, you can append symbols. For example, if you append an equal sign (=) to the keyword NAME, the equal sign functions as a keyword delimiter. Using the example presented here, the result is NAME=John Doe.

If you do not define parameters with a keyword, you must enter the parameters at a clear screen in the same order as they are defined in the list. You can also combine keywords with parameters ordered by position in the list.