MERANT Micro Focus Dialog System™

Dialog System User's Guide

MERANT has made every effort to ensure that this book 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 software products for any particular purpose is expressly excluded and in no event will MERANT be liable for any consequential loss.

Micro Focus® and COBOL Workbench® are registered trademarks of MERANT International Limited.

CCI™, Dialog System™, MERANT™, Micro Focus COBOL™, Net Express™, OSX™, Panels™, and Panels Version 2™ are trademarks of MERANT International Limited.

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

Presentation Manager™ and CUA™ are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.

Microsoft® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

Windows™, Win32™, Windows NT™ and Microsoft Access™ are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Paintbrush™ is a trademark of ZSoft Corporation.

Copyright© 1987-2000 MERANT International Limited
All Rights Reserved.

Preface

This user guide introduces you to the subject of graphical user interfaces and how to use Dialog System to full advantage. It gives you a tour of the major menu choices, taking you through creating and using a simple screenset, showing you the important features and demonstrating the general sequence of events in developing an application. The user guide also covers the more advanced features. There are plenty of examples and sample programs, as well as hints and tips on getting the most out of Dialog System.

Audience

This book is for all programmers and system designers using Dialog System, whether experienced with Micro Focus's earlier Dialog System products or completely new to Micro Focus. It assumes you are familiar with the general concepts of business computing and of using Microsoft Windows.

Related Publications

• Help containing Dialog System Reference

• On-line help for Net Express and for other components of your COBOL system

Notations and Conventions

• Enter refers to the carriage return or Enter key. Where commands to be typed are shown, the Enter key is not explicitly shown; it is treated as implicit that Enter 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.

• PIC X is used rather than PIC 99 with the COMP-X and COMP-5 data types. Unlike PIC 99, PIC X shows the length of the data item and so demonstrates more clearly the use of COMP-X, which is to define a binary item of the specified number of bytes.

• Keytops and menu choices are emboldened within the text.

• Side headings are used to indicate environment specific information. For example:

  Windows:
  Windows specific information.

• In some environments, you might notice that what appears on your screen differs in minor ways (for example, version numbers) from that illustrated in this book. This will not affect the operation of your software.

• The keys described in this book are not available in all environments. When there is a reference to use of a key such as a status or function key, this refers to the logical press and release of this key, rather than physical keystroke. If your environment does not support the key given, please refer to your accompanying Release Notes for the equivalent key.

• The term "window" refers to a delineated area on the screen, normally smaller than the full screen. The term "Windows" refers to Microsoft Windows 95 or later.

• On-line help is not described in the documentation. Select Help from the menu or press the Help button on a dialog box to see context sensitive help information.

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.

• Material enclosed in square brackets [ ] is optional.

• When material is enclosed in braces { }, you must choose from the options within them. If there is only one option in the braces, the braces indicate repetition.

• The ellipsis (. . .) follows { } or [ ] and means you can repeat the material in the { } or [ ]. The number of repetitions allowed is unlimited unless otherwise stated. If the ellipsis is used with [ ] the material can be omitted altogether.

• If a command line does not fit across the page, it is continued on the next line; the continuation line is indented.

• Command line options can be specified as /option or -option.