NET/MASTER Network Control Language (NCL) Reference Manual

#FLD

Panel Control Statements

106126 Tandem Computers Incorporated 6–13

specifies the character that identifies the start of a field in the panel. This is called

a field character. It must be a single nonalphanumeric character. To specify an

alphanumeric character you must use the X'xx' option.

You can use any special character except the ampersand (&), which is reserved for

use with variables. The first #FLD statement to refer to a particular field character

specifies a new character. Subsequent statements that refer to the same field

character modify or extend the attributes of that field character. NCL provides

three standard field characters: %, +, and _. These characters, called default

characters, have the following properties:

Field Character Meaning

% (percent sign) High intensity, output field

+ (plus sign) Low intensity, output field

_ (underscore) High intensity, input field, no validation

These characters can be altered by the DEFAULT operand of the #OPT panel

control statement. If you refer to one of these characters in a #FLD statement, you

are extending or modifying the character definition.

specifies the hexadecimal value of the field character. You can use any value from

X'00' through X'FF', with the exception of the reserved characters X'00' (null), X'20'

(blank in the ASCII code set), and X'26' (ampersand). This allows alphanumeric

characters to be used as field characters.

For example, if you specify X'41', any occurrence of the letter 'A' in the panel

description file is treated as the start of a field. It is preferable to use hexadecimal

values that do not correspond to alphanumeric characters.

If you use the hexadecimal representation of field characters, you must also use

the preparse feature of the #OPT statement to prime these field characters. In this

case, NCL carries out an extra pass of the panel description file before the panel is

displayed. The #OPT PREPARSE option avoids the standard interpretation of

such hexadecimal numbers as normal display characters by NCL, during its first

pass through the panel description file.

Note A panel description file cannot contain more than 90 field characters.

{ BKGCOLOR | BKGCOLOUR }=

color-option

specifies the background color of the terminal. DEFAULT places the terminal in

its native background display color, which is usually black.