Pathmaker Reference Manual

Glossary
067869 Tandem Computers Incorporated Glossary–7
Service. A unit of work to be performed by a server, corresponding to a single SEND
operation in a Pathway environment, as part of a transaction. Services supplied by the
Pathmaker product include reading the next record or inserting a new record. A
custom service might be one that inserts an airline flight reservation record or transfers
money from one bank-account record to another.
Simulation. The displaying of sequences of screens that provide a preview of your
application in its final form. Through simulation, end users can see what an
application will look like before it is actually coded and installed.
Table object name. The Pathmaker name that you assign to a NonStop SQL table on the
SQL Table Registration screen.
Terminal Control Process (TCP). A Pathway requester process that is responsible for
terminal management and transaction control. It interprets Screen COBOL object code
and communicates with server processes.
TMF product. Transaction Monitoring Facility, a Tandem product that controls
transaction concurrency and protects data against system failures.
Transaction. A group of computer operations that reflect a particular commercial
interaction. These operations, including the entry of data about the event, the
processing of that data, and the resulting change in the database, provide a computer
model of the real events making up the transaction. A transaction might be one that
inserts an airline flight reservation record or transfers money from one bank account
record to another.
Transaction Monitoring Facility (TMF). See TMF product.
Transaction (TRNS) requester. A type of Pathmaker requester that accepts general data
entry and calls services to process the user-entered data. It is more versatile than a
database requester because it can call custom services along with the predefined
standard services.
User. See End user.
User conversion procedure. A Tandem Application Language (TAL) procedure for
processing data passed between a requester (Screen COBOL program) and a terminal
screen.
Video attribute. A property of a screen element that determines the visual appearance of
the screen-image locations occupied by the element. An element can be bright or dim,
steady or blinking, light-on-dark or reversed, underlined or not, visible or hidden.
Virtual page. A temporary, empty page following the last page in the Screen Painter.
The virtual page only becomes a real page if you add a screen element to it.
Work subvolume. The subvolume in which the Pathmaker product stores any data or
code files that you create during your online session, if you do not explicitly request
otherwise. By default, your work subvolume is the same as your current subvolume at
the time you enter the Pathmaker product. After the Pathmaker product begins
execution, however, you can specify a different subvolume as your work subvolume.
See also Project subvolume.