Designing Interactive Panels (Panel Services) › Panel Design › Field Characters

Field Characters

Each panel line has one or more fields, starting with a field character which prescribes the field attributes.

You must specify a #FLD control statement for each field character your panel requires. There are two ways of defining field characters:

Character mode

To specify character mode, use any special character other than an alpha or numeric character, and excluding ampersand (&), blank, or null.

Hexadecimal mode

To specify hexadecimal mode, enter the hexadecimal value for the character (for example, X'FA'). Use any hexadecimal value in the range X'01' to X'FF', excluding the values X'0E', X'0F' and any values which correspond to the EBCDIC values of characters not allowed on character mode fields. Hexadecimal mode is used where you need a very large number of field types within one panel and there are insufficient special keyboard characters available to accommodate all of the field characters you require.

Note: If using hexadecimal mode field characters, you must prime the panel definition with the preparse option to assign correct values to field character positions in the actual panel.