NET/MASTER Network Control Language (NCL) Reference Manual

#OPT
Panel Control Statements
106126 Tandem Computers Incorporated 6–31
PREPARSE requests that panel services perform a preliminary substitution scan of
each panel line before processing the line for field characters. PREPARSE specifies
a character ( c ) to be used to determine where substitution is to take place. This
character is processed in a similar manner to an ampersand (&) during standard
variable substitution.
The restriction that you must specify a character other than an ampersand means
that preparsing does not impact standard variable substitution. Preparsing can be
used to alter a field character that appears in a particular position. In this way,
you can allocate a new set of attributes to a field or create an entirely new field (or
a complete line) that in itself contains the required field character.
( c ,S)
specifies that you want the character c as the preparse character for the panel
and that you want static preparsing to apply during preparse processing.
Static preparsing inhibits the movement of preparse or field characters during
the substitution process. This option is useful for panels that are being
dynamically modified to hold data that may vary in length, for which you
want the data to be displayed in columns. Panel services truncates columnar
data if necessary. This can happen if the data is too long to fit into its target
field without overwriting the next occurrence of a preparse or field character
on the same line.
( c ,D)
specifies that you want the character c as the preparse character for the panel
and that you want dynamic preparsing to apply during preparse processing.
Dynamic preparsing permits the movement of preparse or field characters to
the left or right of their original positions. This might be necessary to
accommodate the substitution of differing lengths of data into the panel.
Dynamic preparsing is the default for this option.
Considerations
See also the ASSIGN and CONTROL verbs in Section 3, “Verbs.” The ASSIGN
verb can assign a list or range of values to multiple variables. The CONTROL verb
has some options, such as the PANELRC option, that can affect the way in which
panels are displayed and processed. In particular, the CONTROL PANELRC
option can be used to specify that you want the NCL procedure to receive control
for further processing, when internal validation detects an error in data entered by
a user. The CONTROL verb option FLDCTL must be set if you want to know the
input fields that have changed as a result of a panel display.
See also the ON core statement in Section 2, “Core Statements.” The description of
the ON statement contains a table of system-defined conditions and error
handlers. This table lists conditions, such as the PANEL_ERROR condition, that
can occur during the processing of illegal panel display requests and that must be
handled by the initiating procedure. The #ERR statement does not handle these
conditions.