The purpose of the Dialog entity is to develop and generate online
systems.
A Dialog represents the interaction between Screens that are logically
related to each other. A Dialog is therefore made up of a logical family of
Screens. It is described independently of the physical characteristics of
the hardware or the TP monitor in use.
For each Dialog, you define the characteristics common to all the Screens
which make up the Dialog. These characteristics, which become the default
values of the Screens, are the:
- Presentation options, specified on the Dialog Definition tab:
- The number of lines and columns on the Screen,
- The type of label used for Data Elements (long, short, relational, column),
- The general presentation of these Data Elements (number of elements per
line, alignment, etc.),
- The presentation attributes (intensity, color) according to the nature
of the data (displayed fields, input fields, labels, error messages, etc.).
- Common files (common area, error messages file), as well as some processing
options, specified on the Dialog Complement tab.
You may override these default options for each Screen of the Dialog
if necessary.
You cannot generate a whole Dialog but you can generate each of its Screens,
one at a time.