Custom Dialog Overview
ISPW Custom Dialogs are a new way to define local customizations and extensions to the ISPW product. This section gives an overview and describes the components involved.
Custom Dialogs can be very useful because local customization of ISPW has, until now, only been possible by the ISPW administrator editing and maintaining ISPF dialog panels. As these panels only operate in the 3270 interface, this new customization solution adds the crucial ability to work across all ISPW clients from the same definition.
Defining ISPW Custom Dialogs
An ISPW Custom Dialog is a new component type in the SITE application. It is managed in a similar way to the ISPF panels by using ISPW tasks, but using a component type of WDLG instead of PANL.
WDLG types are added, checked out, and promoted in the same way as ISPF panels. This is so they can be managed together with related SITE components types such as SKEL (ISPF Skeletons) and CLST (CLIST/REXX). When the ‘S’ operation is used to edit them, an ISPW-provided Dialog Editor is invoked. The Dialog Editor allows the administrator to define the layout and processing of the content to be displayed to the user for that dialog.
New configuration options are provided within the M table administration to specify where a custom dialog should be used. For the Generate Options dialog, a new field of Cust Gen Panel appears on the M.CT definition for a component type and on the Type entry of M.AD definitions.
Functioning of ISPW Custom Dialogs
If a Custom Dialog name has been specified, then at designated points in the ISPW processing, the custom dialog will be processed. In the current release, this is only supported when using the Topaz Workbench client—and only for the Generate Options dialog.
A Custom Dialog definition is stored in a PDS member in an ISPW internal XML format. These are loaded by the central ISPW server started task (CM task) where they can be retrieved by any ISPW client interface. To provide similar characteristics to the current ISPF panel usage, the appropriate SITE concatenation will be used based on the user’s RTCONFIG setting. This allows for testing of changes on a user-specific basis.
ISPF Panels Still Needed—For Now
The existing local SITE ISPF panels used for the Generate Parm display in 3270 are still required in this release. Such panels typically contain site-specific code in the panel processing section which ensures all the variables needed by the local ISPF skeletons used to create the batch generate jobs are assigned the desired values.
The capabilities of ISPW Custom Dialogs will be expanded in future ISPW releases, with the ultimate goal being to eliminate the need for ISPF panels.