External Pictures

Automatic Editing and Error Handling › Automatic Editing Criteria › External Pictures

External Pictures

Automatic editing uses the external picture for a field on mapout and mapin as follows:

Mapout

On mapout, the external picture describes how data for the field is displayed on a terminal screen. The following example illustrates the interaction of output data and an external picture:

Program variable storage value	External Picture	Field Display
123456789	#XXX-XX-XXXX	#123-45-6789
99365	99/999	99/365

Mapin

On mapin, automatic editing uses the external picture as follows:

The external picture is checked to determine if the characters in the field are valid. An external picture can be NUMERIC, ALPHABETIC, or ALPHANUMERIC; data in the field must conform to the external picture specifications to be valid.
The external picture is used to eliminate insertion characters from data.

The following example illustrates the interaction of input data and an external picture:

User Input	External Picture	Value Stored
#123-45-6789	#XXX-XX-XXXX	123456789
99/365	99/999	99365

The external picture and input data are processed from left to right. If automatic editing is not enabled for both the map and field, the external picture is not used on mapin.