Designing Screens › Screen Design Display Objects

Screen Design Display Objects

The Screen Design tool defines two types of display objects—templates and screens.

Templates are definitions of portions of a screen. A template can be used by many screens across a business system to define and position standard screen objects. In addition, one or more templates can be used in each screen.

Screens are the view of the system by the user and can contain one or multiple templates. A screen is associated with a single procedure step (or a single-step procedure) and is responsible for providing data to the import view of the procedure step and displaying data from the export view.

A screen in a generated system can appear in the following two states:

• Once as the system has formatted the export view as a response
• Once as the terminal operator has specified the data required in the import view

The following example shows a screen using a template.

Screens and templates may contain the following objects:

• Fields (screens only), which implement the attributes of import and export data views.
• Literals, which are constant information in text or symbols.
• Special fields, which reflect the set of special attributes (attributes not derived from business requirements but introduced during system design for a specific purpose). Special fields generally appear on all screens in the business system.
• Prompts, which are labels for fields and special fields.