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Pk · Beginner Joined: 23 Jul 2005 Posts: 11 Topics: 4

I have developed a chat utility in which I have a panel. If I type some text on the command line and press enter, the entered text would be written into a file, read back , populated in a ISPF table and displayed using TBDISPL. If I press Enter without any text, the rexx would just read the file, populate the table and display it. This holds good for both the users who are chatting.

I would like to make an enhancement wherein, if there s no user input for a prescribe amount of time(for 10secs), the panel should automatically refresh.

Please let me know if there is a way to do it.

semigeezer · Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2005 3:49 pm Post subject:

there really is not a way to do this directly from within ISPF. You could do it with an emulator macro, but that is another discussion and places unreasonable requirements on your users.

The reason is that when ISPF is waiting on screen input, it is waiting on a TGET request. So when you are waiting on user input, your id is suspended in a wait state. Now the obvious question becomes well can't I just attach a task and somehow get the attached task to post the ECB or whatever it takes to satisfy the TGET? Lets just say I've never known anyone to do it.

The other approach that might be suggested is to keep the screen in a CONTROL DISPLAY LOCK type of loop, but that suffers from similar problems. If you do that, the user can't enter data until the loop ends, and the only way to end a continuous loop like that is to use an attention interrupt like PA1, but then you need to code a STAX macro to intercept that and it gets very messy. At one point, think I saw an example that did that without causing a major disruption to the screen, but I've never gotten that to work (though I have made the STAX macro work 'well enough').

Pk · Beginner Joined: 23 Jul 2005 Posts: 11 Topics: 4

Thanks Semigeezer.

I had actually tried the option of Control Display Lock but that didnt help my cause for the same reason that you had quoted that the user cannot type his input till the lock is released. So I thought if there would be a way while coding the panel itself to enable auto refresh.

Anyway , Thanks Semigeezer for the reply!