ISPF Panel Conversion Rules

The conversion of the ISPF panels to Eclipse dialogs is divided into two steps:

• Physical parsing
• Logical parsing

During the physical parsing step, the panel is parsed based on the attribute bytes defined in the panel’s ATTR section. The panel is composed of physical tokens which are separated by the attribute bytes.

Afterwards, the logical parsing step tries to generate the Eclipse dialog from the output of the physical parse process by applying some semantic interpretation rules.

These rules are described as follows:

• Blank panel lines are ignored.
• Consecutive lines which do not contain an input or output field are merged to a text area.ISPF variables which are referenced in a text area are converted into properties which are substituted by their current value at run time.

  If such a text block is followed by one or more lines which contain input or output fields, the last line of the text block is interpreted as the title for the following input or output field group.

• Input fields of the panel are converted into writable combo boxes in the Eclipse dialog.
• Output fields of the panel are converted into read-only text fields in the Eclipse dialog.
• If a line of the ISPF panel contains a mixture of input, output and text fields, the logical parse  process tries to attach the text fields to the input or output fields according to the following rules:
  • Text fields which precede an input or output field are always assigned to the following input or output field as label.
  • Text fields which follow an input and output field and do not precede another input or output field are assigned to the preceding input or output field as a tooltip.
• The logical parse process tries to maintain the count of columns of an input/output field area of the original ISPF panel.
• A MODEL section of an ISPF table panel dialog results in a table in the generated Eclipse dialog.
• The first input field of the MODEL section of an ISPF table panel is always interpreted as a line command field for the table. This input field does not result in an input field in the generated Eclipse dialog. Rather, it results in a context menu of the generated table.The ISPF panel source must contain a VER condition for the line command field listing all allowed line command values. Moreover, the panel generation control file should contain corresponding line command tags mapping the line command values of the ISPF table panel to meaningful values in the context menu.
• If a VER condition is found in the panel’s PROC section for an input field, the following VER conditions are interpreted by the logical parse process:
  • NB resp. NONBLANK: A VER non blank condition causes the mandatory flag to be set for the generated input parameter in the Workflow model.
  • LIST: A VER LIST condition causes a combo box to be generated for the input field in the Eclipse dialog which contains the listed values.

  A VER condition in the PROC section for an input file is always evaluated even if it is only a conditional VER condition.

Some of these rules can be overruled by certain phrases in the panel generation control file.

These phrases are:

• categories=false

  This phrase means that the last line of a text block is not interpreted as the title for the following input/output field group of the Eclipse dialog, but as part of the text block.

• table_header=true

  This phrase means that the logical parser tries to interpret the last line of the BODY section in a ISPF table panel as column headers for the following table. This interpretation is only done if the count of words of the last line in the BODY section matches the count of columns of the table.