Pathmaker Programming Guide

6 Using the Screen Painter
067868 Tandem Computers Incorporated 6–1
The Screen Painter is the primary tool for creating an attractive application screen in
the Pathmaker product. The Screen Painter is used for viewing and modifying the
default screens that appear in your application program. After you have viewed the
default screen in the Screen Painter, you can either modify it directly in the Screen
Painter or modify it by changing the screen information in the Pathmaker product or
through PMADL.
There are two basic approaches to screen creation in the Pathmaker product:
You can let the Pathmaker product create a default screen from information you
specify in the DDL descriptions and on the Requester Definition series of screens;
you can then use the Screen Painter to enhance the appearance of the default
screen that the Pathmaker product creates.
You can use the Screen Painter to paint a screen for a requester that does not have
DDL definitions associated with it yet.
For most applications, you will find the first approach is more efficient because
converting painted fields to functioning data fields can be a time-intensive process.
Creating default screens is discussed in Section 5.
Note For the Screen Painter to display any DDL definition changes that were made while you were in the
Screen Painter, you must exit the Screen Painter and then reenter it to see these changes. For example,
if you navigated to the the Utility Menu screen and used DDL to change some definitions and then
navigated back to the Screen Painter, the Screen Painter would not register the changes until you exited
and the DDL definition changes were read by the Pathmaker product.
In this section you will learn how to use the Screen Painter to modify your application
screens. The first part of this section briefly describes the basic Screen Painter
components: screen elements and paging information. Refer to the Pathmaker Reference
Manual for more details about the component screens of the screen painter.
The second part of this section discusses how to do the basic Screen Painter editing
functions and how to convert a painted screen into one with functioning data fields.
Screen Painter
Components
There are two basic components of a Screen Painter screen:
Screen elements are indivisible components of the screen image.
Paging information indicates to the Pathmaker product how many pages each
logical screen contains, how each page appears, and what information is presented
to you on each screen.
The Pathmaker product extracts information about the screen elements and paging
information to produce the screen section of the SCREEN COBOL program when you
generate a requester.