Pathmaker Programming Guide

Generating Requesters
Creating Requesters
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Generating Requesters After you have defined a requester, you can use the Pathmaker product to generate
SCREEN COBOL source code for it and compile the source code into SCREEN COBOL
object code. To generate the simplest possible requester successfully, you must have
specified a requester name and reference object and have added the requester to the
project catalog.
You can generate a requester as soon as you have defined it, but you must regenerate a
requester every time you make any change to it. To be most efficient, wait to generate
a requester until you have:
Defined all of the requesters and services that this requester will call
Done all Screen Painter work
Specified any parameters this requester will pass to other requesters or to services
However, this is not always possible. If you want to create custom SCREEN COBOL
code for the requester, for example, you must first generate the requester to create the
file that will contain the custom SCREEN COBOL code and later regenerate the
requester to incorporate the code you have written.
You generate requesters from the Requester Definition screen by pressing shifted F6.
If you want to generate only source code and not compile that source code, you can go
to the Requester Generation Data screen and specify a source code file and change Y to
N on the Compile field.
Requester Generation
Phases
The Pathmaker product generates requesters in two phases:
The first phase is completed before returning control to your terminal. In this
phase, the Pathmaker product reads all information in its project catalog about the
requester and verifies that the information is valid for generation. For example, in
this phase, the Pathmaker product checks every item in the Requester Context list
for validity, ensuring that each item is either in the DDL dictionary or is a
NonStop SQL table. The Pathmaker product then returns control to the terminal
and continues with phase two.
If the Pathmaker product encounters an error during phase one of requester
generation, an error message describing the problem is displayed in the advisory
line of the Requester Definition screen. The same message appears in the Last
Attempted Generation Message field the next time you visit the Requester
Generation Data screen.
In the second phase of requester generation, the Pathmaker product generates the
default screen (if needed), loads the help data base, generates the SCREEN COBOL
source code, compiles the requester, and enters the results of the generation
(whether successful or unsuccessful) into the project catalog.
If the Pathmaker product encounters an error during phase two of requester
generation, a general error message is displayed in the Last Attempted Generation
Message field of the Requester Generation Data screen. You must inspect the
compiler listing to find the specific errors encountered during this phase.