Admin Alert: Switching Between 80- and 132-Character Mode in Express PC5250

by Joe Hertvik
Until now, IBM's Client Access Express for Windows V5R1M0 displayed up to only 80 columns of data on a PC5250 screen. With a simple change to the configuration of the PC5250 workstation profile, Express V5R1M0 now displays both 80- and 130-column data. With this setting, you can display most of your data on a PC5250 screen, which opens the door for a few interesting possibilities.



Here's how to do it. Inside your PC5250 V5R1M0 session, open the Configure PC5250 panel by selecting Communications, and then Configure, from the menu bar. In the Type of Emulation area on this panel, you will see a drop-down box called Size, which is set to 27x80 by default. To activate wide- screen support, click on the Size drop-down and change the value to 27x132. Click the OK button on the panel, and PC5250 will disconnect the current session and reconnect a new session to your iSeries or AS/400 by using the values entered on the Configure PC5250 screen. At this point, you're session is ready to display either 27x80 or 27x132 screens, depending on the screen output.

To test this support, bring up both an 80-character display and a 132-character screen. For the 80-character display, type in the Work with Active Jobs (WRKACTJOB) command and the screen will display WRKACTJOB data in its normal 80-column display. To see what a wide-screen character display would look like, display your job's spool files--such as an old job log or other printer file--by typing in the Work with Spooled Files (WRKSPLF) command and then selecting option 5=Display to view one of the files. You'll see that the screen automatically resizes the fonts to display 130 characters of the spool file on the screen. You'll be able to see most of the file on your PC5250 screen, rather than the truncated version you would see had you left the screen size at 27x80.

And this works with any OS/400 green-screen output command that generates wide-screen responses. Another interesting screen to view after you make this change is to go into Edit mode and edit a source file member using PDM. With the PDM editor, you will now see the source file member's changed dates that are generally hidden past the 80th column of the screen. Like the spool file, the font is adjusted downward to fit everything on the screen.

This support also allows you to see the first 130 characters of your physical file records when you use the Display Physical File Member (DSPPFM) command. Any OS/400 screen that displays output above 80 characters will now be displayed in 130-character mode in your PC5250 session because of this configuration change.

Also note that this support doesn't allow you to view a full 132 characters, as you might think it should (and as the Size parameter would lead you to believe). Rather, it shows the first 130 characters of your output on the screen. If you want to see any characters past the 130th column, you would have to use the Shift-right F key, which is usually designated as the F20 key.

Another nice side effect of displaying 130 characters on your PC5250 screens is that it makes it easier to copy a screen into other Windows programs, such as Word. To copy a 130-character V5R1 PC5250 screen into Word, use the following procedure:

1. From the PC5250 menu bar, mark all data on the screen by selecting Edit, then Select All. This will create a dotted-line box around your screen data.

2. Again from the PC5250 menu bar, copy the screen to the Windows clipboard by selecting Edit, then Copy. This copies everything within the dotted line box that now surrounds your data.

3. Go over to the Word document and paste the screen data into the file by selecting Edit, then Paste (from the Word menu bar). Adjust the font size and tabular columns to fit your document style

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This procedure allows you to easily paste screen data that spans more than 80-columns into an 80-column Word document. Unfortunately, the copied data will not retain its original columnar form from the PC5250 screen, so you may have to do some massaging of your Word document's data to meet your needs.