3.5.1 Use Micro Focus Plus Screen Designer

You can use Micro Focus Plus Screen Designer to customize host sessions and provide a modern interface with new features and capabilities. The Screen Designer provides a number of modern controls that you can add to your host screens to provide a more modern user experience for your host programs. Some examples of how you can use the Screen Designer include:

  • Adding tool tips to fields to help your users get over the difficult spots in your application.

  • Replacing old-style numbered option lists with more modern drop-down selection lists.

  • Adding buttons to the host application's interface and programming them to start macros or perform other actions.

  • Replacing manual entry of dates with a graphical calendar date-picker.

What you need to do to use the Screen Designer with Reflection

You’ll need to follow this process to set up Screen Designer controls on a session.

NOTE:

  • Micro Focus Reflection Desktop Plus does not support Japanese and other languages that use double byte information.

  • You can only customize screens for 3270 mainframe and 5250 AS/400 sessions.

  • When you run a macro in Plus mode, controls do not appear on any customized screens until the macro reaches the final screen.

Get and save a screen history

  1. Open a session and then select Screen History.

    The steps depend on your user interface mode.

    User Interface Mode

    Steps

    Ribbon

    On the Session ribbon, click the Screen History button.

    Reflection Browser

    On the Reflection menu, choose View and thenScreen History.

    TouchUx

    Tap the Wrench icon and then under View, select Screen History.

  2. Navigate through the screens you want to modernize.

  3. On the Appearance tab, in the Plus group, from the Plus drop down list, select Export History for Screen Designer.

Use the Screen Designer to set up the controls on the screen

Follow this basic process to set up the controls. For detailed instructions, see the online Help provided with the Screen Designer.

  1. On the Appearance tab, from the Plus drop down menu, select Screen Designer.

  2. Create a new project, and then import the screen history.

  3. Add static controls in the Screen Design view.

  4. For dynamic control or conditional controls, create rules in the Rule Manager window.

  5. Generate a Screen Designer customization file. Be sure to save the file in a trusted location, such as your user data directory (by default, this is Documents\Micro Focus\Reflection\).

    The customization (.rdar) file is an archive file which contains the rules file (.rsdo) and resource files such as images, macros, and scripts.

Set up your session to use the controls

  1. Open your session and select the Appearance tab.

  2. On the Plus drop down list, choose Select Plus Customization File and then select the customization file you created for this session.

    The controls you created are displayed on the session file screens.