When the screen image sections created as a result of a series of BMS and
non-BMS SEND commands are merged, a new screen image section is created; it
contains, as far as possible, all the fields from all the screen image sections
which were used to construct it. However, if fields from two or more of the
constituent screen images wholly or partly overlap, this is not possible,
and some of the overlapping fields may be modified or suppressed entirely:
- When fields overlap, fields associated with the earlier BMS or non-BMS
SEND commands will be modified or suppressed in favor of fields from later
commands.
- If an input field is partially or wholly overlapped, the entire input
field is discarded and will not appear in the final HTML.
- If an input field partially overlaps some normal text, any visible text
up to the start of the input field will be visible in the final HTML and the
remaining data will be discarded, irrespective of whether there is more text
visible after the end of the input field on a 3270 device.
- If the table cell contains a horizontal rule tag (<hr>),
overlapping the contents of the cell will produce unpredictable results.
These rules are summarized in
Table 1.
Table 1. Overlapping fields in a merged screen image sectionField from earlier SEND |
Field from later SEND |
Result |
Input (unprotected) |
Input (unprotected) or Text (protected) |
The earlier field is entirely suppressed |
Text (protected) |
Input (unprotected) |
Based upon the character position in the 3270 screen: - Protected characters to the left of the input field are retained.
- Protected characters overlain by the input field are suppressed.
- Protected characters to the right of the input field are suppressed.
|
Text (protected) |
Text (protected) |
Based upon the character position in the 3270 screen,
characters from the later send will overwrite characters from the earlier
send. |
You can edit HTML templates created from BMS maps before using them in
an application program. However, the algorithm by which the screen image sections
are merged requires that the HTML in the sections has a particular structure.
Therefore, when you edit the screen image section in a template, and the section
will be merged with others, there are guidelines which you must follow:
- Each HTML page contains two comments with the strings DFHROW and DFHCOL
respectively. The values that follow these strings are important during the
merging process as they are used to calculate the position of each field on
the 3270 screen. If these comments are modified or deleted, the screen image
sections will not be merged but will appear in the final HTML page appended
one below the other.
- The closing tags for table cells (</td>) and table
rows (</tr>) are optional.
- Table cells must either contain a piece of normal text with or without
additional attribute tags or they must contain an input field. Additionally,
they may contain a mixture of text and input fields in the same table cell
if the text and input fields follow each other without additional tags between
them.
- Empty table cells may not contain null values (X'00') or spaces
between the opening and closing tags. In other words, empty cells must be
coded as <td></td>.
- You can bound a section of text or an input field with one or more of
the following pairs of tags:
- emphasis
- <em> ... </em>
- strong
- <strong> ... </strong>
- font
- <font> ... </font>
- underline
- <u> ... </u>
- blink
- <blink> ... </blink>
If you use these tags, you must ensure that each tag has a
corresponding closing tag. You must also ensure that the opening and closing
tags are properly nested. For example, <u><strong> ... </strong></u> is
properly nested, but <u><strong> ... </u></strong> is
not.
- If you insert other tags into the table cell, they must appear before
or after the text or input field but may not appear both before and after
in the same table cell.
- HTML comments are allowed in the table cell and may appear before, after
or on both sides of a piece of normal text or an input field.
- If the cell contains comments, it must also contain either a piece of
normal text or an input field.