Micro Focus Server Express™

Programmer's Guide to Creating User Interfaces

MERANT™

Issue 1
January 1999

Copyright © 1999 MERANT International Limited. All rights reserved.
This document and the proprietary marks and names used herein are protected by international law.

MERANT has made every effort to ensure that this manual is correct and accurate, but reserves the right to make changes without notice at its sole discretion at any time.

The software described in this document is supplied under a license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license, and in particular any warranty of fitness of MERANT products for any particular purpose is expressly excluded and in no event will MERANT be liable for any consequential loss.

Micro Focus® and Animator® are registered trademarks, and Dialog System™, Forms™, MERANT™, Micro Focus COBOL™, Object COBOL™, and Server Express™ are trademarks, of MERANT International Limited

IBM®, OS/2® and PC® are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation

Microsoft®, and MS® are registered trademarks, and Windows™ is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation

Data General® is a registered trademark, and DG ICOBOL™ is a trademark of Data General Corporation

RM/COBOL® is a registered trademark of Ryan-McFarland Corporation

UNIX® and X/Open® are registered trademarks of X/Open Company Limited

Preface

The Server Express Programmer's Guides are complete guides to specific areas of the Micro Focus COBOL systems.

This guide contains everything you need to know to create user interfaces with a Micro Focus COBOL system, covering both character and graphical user interfaces.

Audience

You should be familiar with the COBOL language and with your operating system. You should read the Getting Started book for this COBOL system and be familiar with the COBOL development cycle described in the Server Express User Guide before reading other books in the book set.

MERANT

MERANT was formed by combining Micro Focus and INTERSOLV. All reference to the companies Micro Focus or INTERSOLV in this book should now be taken to mean MERANT. Micro Focus is retained as the family name for the Micro Focus product set produced by MERANT.

Notation

The notation used in the books is as follows:

Enter refers to the carriage-return or Enter key. Where commands to be typed are shown, the Enter key is not shown. It is treated as implicit that the Enter key must be pressed at the end of the line.
Hexadecimal numbers are enclosed in quotation marks and preceded by a lower-case "x" or "h"; for example, x"9D", h"03FF". The "x" is used when the hexadecimal number represents a character string; the "h" when it represents a numerical value.
With COMP-X and COMP-5, PIC X is used rather than PIC 99. Unlike PIC 99, PIC X shows the length of the data item directly and so demonstrates more clearly the use of COMP-X, which is to define a binary item of the specified number of bytes.

Command Lines

The notation used to describe the format of command lines is as follows:

Words printed in italics are generic terms representing names to be devised by you.
Words printed in nonitalic characters are the actual words you must enter. You must type them in upper or lower case as shown.
Square brackets [ ] mean the material inside them is optional.
Braces { } mean you must choose from the options inside them. If there is only one option in the braces, they mean repetition.
An ellipsis (...) following { } or [ ] means you can repeat the material inside them. The number of repetitions allowed is unlimited unless otherwise stated. Square brackets [ ] with an ellipsis mean you can omit the material altogether.
If a command line does not fit across the page, it is continued on the next line; the continuation line is indented.
The books may refer you to the Release Notes for details specific to a particular UNIX platform.
All command line formats and examples are for the standard UNIX shell, the Bourne shell. If you are using another shell, see your UNIX documentation for the appropriate formats.
Where examples showing environment variables do not specifically show them being exported to the shell, it is treated as implicit that they are exported.
Some keystrokes using function keys or the Alt or Ctrl keys are not available on all UNIX platforms. The User Guide contains a UNIX Key Usage chart, listing how the keystrokes shown in the books map onto actual keystrokes.

Notes

F1=Help appears on every menu in character-mode Micro Focus software. It invokes a help screen describing the current menu. F1=Help is not described in the documentation.
What appears on your screen may differ in minor ways (for example, version numbers) from that illustrated in the books. This will not affect the operation of your software.

About This Book

This book is divided into three parts, as follows:

Part 1 introduces you to the methods available for creating user interfaces for use with Micro Focus COBOL applications.
Part 2 covers creating character user interfaces.
Part 3 covers mechanisms for handling characters and attributes in user interfaces.

Key to COBOL System Library Routines

This book contains descriptions of COBOL system library routines. Each description contains the routine name and function and the following entries (as appropriate):

Syntax:	Shows the CALL statement you could use to call the routine. For all routines except the call-by-number routines (those of the form X"nn"), the optional RETURNING clause is also shown. Every routine returns a value showing the result of the operation. Unless otherwise indicated, zero indicates success, nonzero indicates failure. This value is left in the data item specified in the RETURNING clause, in this reference, status-code. If this clause is omitted, the value is left in the special register RETURN-CODE. (If call-convention bit two is set, RETURN-CODE is not changed.) status-code must be a numeric data item capable of holding positive values from 0 to 65535; for example, PIC X(2) COMP-5. The name of the routine must be coded in upper case.
Parameters:	Describes any parameters shown in the RETURNING and USING clause. A parameter enclosed in brackets, for example, [parameter1] is optional and might not be needed for all forms of the routine.
On Entry:	Indicates which of the parameters shown are passed on entry
On Exit:	Indicates which of the parameters shown are returned on exit Where bits of one or more bytes are referenced, bit 0 is the least significant (rightmost) bit.
Comments:	Provides any additional information necessary for the successful use of the routine
See Also:	Lists other related topics.