Controlling the orientation of widgets

There are two special check boxes that provide you control over widget presentation when your application runs in the WebSphere® Application Server. This control applies to:
  • The whole customized screen, in case of Prepopulated using Default Rendering or Prepopulated using Fields in the new transformation wizard
  • Selected specific widgets in the case of the:
    • Insert Host Component wizard
    • Properties view of a HATS specific component on a transformation
    • Rendering options or Rendering tab of a HATS screen combination
These two check boxes are:
  • Reverse text in widget
  • Reverse widget's orientation

On a left-to-right screen, when the Reverse widget's orientation check box is selected, the GUI image is changed to be right-to-left. Similarly, when the Reverse text in widget check box is selected, the text within the GUI image is changed to right-to-left.

For example, suppose you have the left-to-right screen that contains the following text (upper case letters are bidirectional data and lower case letters remain as English data): 
BIDI TEXT

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When you customize this screen as RTL. it is displayed as: 
TXET IDIB

pleh=10fp
From the user's point of view, everything is correct except the function key. The function key is recognized, but it is displayed backwards.

For the customized screen to appear correctly, you must select both the Reverse widget's orientation and the Reverse text in widget check boxes when inserting the function key host component into a customized screen.

When you do this, the screen is displayed as: 
TXET IDIB

pf01=help

When you replace a text input field with a drop-down list in a bidirectional project, the captions of the drop-down list items are not affected by the screen orientation . The captions will always appear in visual LTR format, unless you select the Reverse text in widget check box for the widget. In that case the captions will be appear in visual RTL format.

Also, when creating bidirectional HATS applications, and copying and pasting multiple lines of text from a protected field into a visual input field, the text may be reversed. If you copy and paste one line at a time, the orientation will be preserved.