WebFacing offers the ability to preserve the existing bidirectional (or bi-di) support from a 5250 application when it is Web-enabled.
Computer systems can process text and user interface elements left to right (as is the case in English) or right to left. Software that has support to handle these languages are said to have bi-di support.
Because existing 5250 applications are often already bi-di enabled, converting these applications requires some special steps to ensure that the WebFacing process interprets the direction of the input screens correctly.
Web technology like HTML and XHTML support bi-di with the common base direction attribute dir which can have a value of ltr (left-to-right) or rtl (right-to-left). This attribute can be applied to a number of different tags and the effect depends on the type of widget. Child elements inherit from the parent element. For example, to set the base direction of the entire HTML document to right-to-left, you would apply the attribute to the <html> tag: <html dir="rtl">.
Tabbable widgets (elements that should be accessible by using the Tab key like fields and hyperlinks) can be assigned a tab index. Most browsers assume a default tab index order that proceeds through all tabbable widgets from left-to-right and top-to-bottom.
On
5250 screens where the CHECK(RLTB) keyword is used, WebFacing
uses a grid to correctly implement right-to-left tabbing order on a left-to-right
Web page. To accommodate fields which have been moved from their DDS positions,
the grid has 250 columns and 131 rows. (The maximum value for the tabindex attribute
is 32767.)
In the case of new tabbable widgets added through Web settings, you can use the substitution variable &{TABINDEX}. This will calculate the correct tab index order of your widget at conversion time.
{ } [ ]Therefore, the tab index substitution variable is not supported for members using the Arabic 420 code page, nor are other Javascript constructs, like arrays, that rely on these characters.
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