MS-Word CA 5250 data exchange ?

[Guest.Visitor]

We have a requirement to put selected fields from a 5250 screen into a Word document, and to put data from a Word document into a 5250 screen. We use CA 3.1.2 on NT, and Office 97. Any advice re product or company that might address this requirement appreciated. Thanks Dean Pichotto

[David Abramowitz]

On Tuesday, June 01, 1999, 01:44 PM, dean pichotto wrote: We have a requirement to put selected fields from a 5250 screen into a Word document, and to put data from a Word document into a 5250 screen. We use CA 3.1.2 on NT, and Office 97. Any advice re product or company that might address this requirement appreciated. Thanks Dean Pichotto

---

You may use a combination of MS Word's Mail-Merge features, and select ODBC as your data source. If you have the Client Access (or similar) ODBC driver correctly configured, you should be able to merge AS/400 data with your MS Word document. An MS Word document may be saved as Rich Text Format(RTF), and then be transfered to an AS/400 folder. The document may then be accessed by Officevision (OV/400). David Abramowitz

[Guest.Visitor]

Thanks David- Can ODBC be used to refer to fields on a CA 5250 screen, though? I thought it could only point to AS400 tables. Also, I think Officevision support is being canceled; anyway, we need to populate the 5250 screen with Word data - a kind of cut&paste operation.. Any product ideas? thanks again

[Guest.Visitor]

On Monday, June 07, 1999, 09:41 AM, dean pichotto wrote: Thanks David- Can ODBC be used to refer to fields on a CA 5250 screen, though? I thought it could only point to AS400 tables. Also, I think Officevision support is being canceled; anyway, we need to populate the 5250 screen with Word data - a kind of cut&paste operation.. Any product ideas? thanks again I can tell you what my company does. We had the very same need. Our application on the AS/400 is a legacy green screen data entry program. The user keys in some data, and based on an event code they enter, we transfer control to Word Perfect, merge the data from the AS/400 screen they were just on and when they're done, we send the data from the document back to the AS/400 where it is displayed. This is all accomplished using a combination of FTP, Word Perfect Macros and an FTP server on each PC client using the software. I keep thinking I should write an article about this someday, but I never get around to it. Basically what happens is: 1. A data file, made up of the elements on the screen, are FTP'd to the PC. 2. An FTP script is built that sends an FTP EXEC command to the FTP server on the PC client. This causes the FTP server to start Word Perfect and run a macro. The appropriate document is opened in Word Perfect, based on what was passed to the FTP server, and the data is merged. 3. When the user is done making their changes, the document is then closed via another macro, the data is FTP'd back to the AS/400, using another FTP script that was written on the fly on the AS/400 just prior to opening Word Perfect, and the data is written to a DB2/400 file. At that point it is displayed on the screen. I've left out many details, I realize, but there's a lot going on that'd take too much to cover here. You need to ensure that the AS/400 program stays in sync with the PC program so you have to pause processing on the AS/400. We use dtaq's to control processing timing, but there are other ways of doing it. Also, there are other ways, perhaps better even, of getting the data to the Word Perfect document. You could use ODBC, OLE DB or even write a little bit of JAVA code to do this for you. The main thing we needed was some means of starting a PC program from within an executing RPG program. We did this using the FTP server (www.cat-soft.com) from Serv-U. I'll leave it to your imagination to come up with other, more creative ways of accomplishing this. I'm not even sure I'm going to stick with the method I described here. I use it now because I don't have time to research something else, but I may eventually look at alternative processing techniques. If you come up with something different, let us know about it here.