The dot before the Net : Others

EHLLAPI Progamming Guide & other resources

Sanket Bakshi — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 02:07:22 GMT

A couple of days ago, I had blogged about Automating 3270 emulators with EHLLAPI. While looking for some more information on it, I came across the EHLLAPI Programming Reference published by Alebra Technologies.

Its almost a 90 pager PDF guide that explains well in detail about all the functions that can be performed with the EHLLAPI along with how you can go about implementing them. Even some gotchas that you need to look for.

There is also a very nice sample provided by Luca Bertoncini at Code Project titled - "Using EHLLAPI in C#".

Overall, these are very nice and helpful resources that can help you get started quickly for automating the 3270 emulators.

--Sanket

Automating 3270 emulators with EHLLAPI

Sanket Bakshi — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 21:36:40 GMT

The green screen days aren't completely gone yet! If you are working in integration projects, there will be a couple of times when you bump into those ugly green screens that want to hide everything that they have into a closed box called the mainframe. Most of the times, these mainframe apps just wont go because they are very crucial to the business. But the entire org moves over to the Microsoft platform. So what do you do? The simplest way is of course - use emulators :) There are a lot of emulators in the market that you can use like the Zephyr Passport or the Attachmate Extra or the BlueZone emulator by Seagull Software.

Much of these 3270 apps were designed the archaic way and have no real connection to the word "UI". But still they stand there and we got to figure out some ways to ease the pains of using them. That's where we think of automating them from our own applications.

Somewhere in the medieval age, between ours and the archaic green screen age, when the green screens were being accessed from the PCs using the DOS based TSRs, somebody came up with a API interface that can be used to access and control these 3270 sessions. Personally, I don't think anybody has touched these APIs to make them better after that. These are being called the EHLLAPI (right from the medieval age) - the Extended High Level Language API.

Now when you are dealing with integrating the functionality at the presentation layer - which is what you would be doing most of the times with CCF, the EHLLAPIs come real handy. Most of the emulators out there in the market support EHLLAPI as a standard way of interacting. In effect, you can get one EHLLAPI program that can work with all the emulators that support EHLLAPI. The EHLLAPI will allow you to interact with the emulator screen exactly as if you have a user interacting with it. If it can be best understood with a scenario, here goes a simple one. You have a mainframe app that requires you to provide your username and password in order to use it. Simple isn't it? In a default case, the user would always need to go to the emulator screen and type in his credentials and hit the "Return" key. That's definitely a very repetitive task and you would love it if the system just knows who you are and logs you in. Right? Combining the stuff, we can use the SSO to map the users windows credentials to his mainframe login and then use the EHLLAPI with the emulator to automate the login procedure after fetching the credentials from the SSO.

The EHLLAPI provides just one method to interact with it. That's the hllapi(). The function takes certain parameters that determine what actions are to be performed. The actions to be performed are determined by an integer number. For example its 40 to set the cursor position and 3 to send a keyboard key to the emulator. (I told you guys, I don't think this has been updated ever since the medieval age :) ). Along with every function goes the data that the API can use for performing the action. Like for example, to set a cursor position, you need to know what the position is. Or to set the text, you need to know what text to set. This information goes in the data field.

To access the EHLLAPI, the emulator would usually come with a DLL that would encapsulate the EHLLAPI code. In my case, I worked with the BlueZone Emulator by Seagull Software and they ship a DLL named - PCSHLL.dll. This can be referenced using a DllImport statement and that's it. Your C# code will be able to interact with the emulator. Here is an example of how it will go -

[DllImport("PCSHLL.dll")]
public static extern UInt32 hllapi(out UInt32 Func, StringBuilder Data, out UInt32 Length, out UInt32 RetC);

Hope this alleviates a bit of pain for all you guys who are looking at a way of getting these green screens to do some productive work on Windows.

Mumbai Blast Victims - Lets try to lend our helping hand

Sanket Bakshi — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 20:32:00 GMT

Off topic, but just today 8 horrifying blasts have shook the city of Mumbai - India's financial capital & main trade center. All of these blasts have occured in the local trains which are almost like the nervous system of the city.

Over 150 people have been killed and a lot more injured.
http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/jul/11train.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5169332.stm

The telephone lines are already jammed, for those within India, Times of India is providing an SMS service to know about those affected . These SMSs are being broadcasted on all the news channels. This can help you know about your friends or relatives confirming that they are safe. To avail this service from within India, you can send an SMS to 8888. This will be broadcasted on the news channels.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/okarticleshow/1733065.cms

News channels including ND TV are also showing names of those injured and admitted to the nearby hospitals.

The govt has already started its remedial measure, but lets do whatever it takes on our part to try and help the unfortunate victims.

--Sanket

Pl note that the views and opinions expressed on this blog are solely mine and do not represent the opinions of my employer.

IBF stands for Information Bridge Framework

Sanket Bakshi — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 12:09:00 GMT

The Information Bridge Framework helps connect your backend LOB apps to the front end tools that you use the most - Microsoft Office. In marketing terms, it would reduce costs by providng faster discovery of information and better integration by making the data from the business systems directly available in the Office Applications.

Starting from Office 2003, the MS Office provides support for Smart Tags and Smart Panes. The IBF leverages these features and uses them so that the users can directly start the business functions directly from the Office Tools. For eg. Lets say a customer service executive recieves an email that mentions about a particular service request with its Id and then asks about its status. Because, the MS Office systems are connected to the backend LOB Apps, the MS Outlook immediately detects the service request number and provides a smart tag to it (The dotted underline to a word that you might've seen in several Office Documents). To get a glimpse of what a smart tag is, try typing in a place name in MS Word Document such as "Seattle". MS Word immediately recongnises it as a place. Going ahead in our case, as the executive clicks the smart tag, he can find various actions that he can perform on it. The actions, for instance, can be "Get details for this service request", "Set Priority for this request" or something even more complex like - "Create service request status doc". Once the executive selects an action, the IBF gets into action and using the web services based middle-tier logic, connects to the end systems to perform required actions on the LOB Apps.

Looks interesting right?

Get to know more about this framework @ -
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/tool/ibf/default.aspx

Notepad Easter Egg

Sanket Bakshi — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:22:00 GMT

Lot of times, we use the Notepad to quickly write down some points. (Well, when OneNote probably isn’t handy).

Notepad offers a really nice feature for such users.

Imagine Notepad automatically appending the timestamp every time you open it to write some info.

Take a look at this –

1. Create a blank text file with .LOG as the first line of the file, followed by a carriage return. Save the file with any .txt extension.

2. Double-click the file to open it and notice that Notepad appends the current date and time to the end of the file and places the cursor on the line after.

3. Type your notes and then save and close the file.

Each time you open the file, Notepad repeats the process, appending the time and date to the end of the file and placing the cursor below it.

Hope this helps some of you!!!