Screen operation

A screen operation contains information for managing a particular application screen.

This information can be accumulated during screen operations recording or flow recording or can be created manually using the screen operations editor.

A screen operation contains three types of information:

A reference to a screen description:
A screen operation contains a reference to a screen description that describes a particular application screen (see Screen message, screen description, descriptor in the Developer for System z information center). During flow recording and in a few other situations, when the host editor has recognized the screen description that matches the currently displayed application screen, then the host editor searches for screen operations that reference the recognized screen description (see Recognized screen description and Finding screen interactions for the current application screen in the Developer for System z information center).
Screen interactions:
A screen interaction is a sequence of actions that are applied to the application screen described by the referenced screen description. The actions can include Input actions, an AID key action, Insert actions, and Extract action (see Recognized screen description and Finding screen interactions for the current application screen in the Developer for System z information center)

A screen operation can contain multiple screen interactions. When you record a flow, the host editor provides each new flow node with not only a reference to a particular screen operation but also with a notation of which screen interaction in that screen operation is to be performed when the flow node is played back.

Note: Although each screen interaction is assigned a default name when it is created, such as "Screen Interaction 1", you should assign a more meaningful and memorable name to each screen interaction that you intend to use in a flow recording. Then, when you are doing the flow recording and the host editor allows you to select from a list of screen interactions a single screen interaction that is going to be used to process the current application screen, you can look at the name of each screen interaction in the list and hopefully remember from the name what actions the screen interaction performs.
A list of next screens:
A next screen is the name of a screen description that matches one of the application screens that can validly occur after the currently displayed application screen. The list of next screens contains one next screen for each application screen that can validly occur.

At runtime, after the specified AID key is generated and the next application screen is displayed, the runtime environment compares each screen in the list of next screens with the new application screen until a match is found. Only screen descriptions screens in the current list of valid next screens are compared.