set considerations for Text UI

formName

The name of a print form whose fields you want to reset, or the name of a text form for which you want to change one or more field properties.

formFieldName

The name of a field within a print or text form.

value

Different values are available for forms and form fields.

For print forms, the only possible value is empty, as described below. (To explicitly set a field to null, use an assignment statement such as myField = null.)

For text forms, the following values are available:

alarm

Causes the terminal to beep when the form appears following the next converse statement.

empty

Clears the entire form:

• Numeric fields are set to zero.
• Character fields are set to blanks.
• Date/time fields are set to the current date or time, and INTERVAL fields are set to zero.
• Fields of ANY type are set according to the type of their current value; if they do not currently have a value, the set statement has no effect on them.

initial

Resets the entire form to its original contents and attributes, as defined in the form declaration, independent of any changes made by the program.

For form fields, the following values are available:

blink

Causes the text to blink repeatedly. Available only in COBOL generation.

bold

Causes the text to appear in boldface.

cursor

Positions the cursor at the beginning of the specified field.

dim

Causes the field to be appear in lower intensity than normal. Use this effect to deemphasize field contents. In COBOL environments, the value has the same effect as normalIntensity.

empty

Clears the specified field:

• Numeric fields are set to zero.
• Character fields are set to blanks.
• Date/time fields are set to the current date or time, and INTERVAL fields are set to zero.
• Fields of ANY type are set according to the type of their current value; if they do not currently have a value, the set statement has no effect on them.

full

Sets an empty, blank, or null field to a series of identical characters (based on the fillCharacter field property) before the form is presented. The user must remove all these fill characters to prevent the form returning them to the program. To use the full modifier, the form group must be generated with the setFormItemFull build descriptor option.

An MBCHAR field is considered empty if it contains all single-byte spaces, and the full modifier fills such a field with single-byte characters.

initial

Resets the field to its original contents and attributes, as defined in the form declaration, independent of any changes made by the program.

initialAttributes

Resets the field to its original attributes, as defined in the form declaration. Neither the value nor the type of the field is affected.

invisible

Makes the field text invisible.

masked

Generally used for password fields. In COBOL generation, this is the same as invisible. In Java™, typed input appears as asterisks.

modified

Sets the modified data tag, as described in Modified data tag and modified property.

noHighlight

Removes the effects of the blink, reverse, and underline modifiers.

normal

Has the same effect as the combined normalIntensity, unmodified, and unprotected modifiers.

normalIntensity

Sets the field to be visible, without boldface.

protect

Sets the field so that the user cannot overwrite its contents. See also skip.

reverse

Reverses the text and background colors.

selectedColor

Sets the color field-specific property to the value you specify. The valid values for selectedColor are as follows:

• black
• blue
• defaultColor
• green
• magenta
• red
• cyan
• white
• yellow

In COBOL environments, the black value is not available and defaultColor (usually green) is used instead. For more information about default colors, see color.

skip

Sets the field so that the user cannot overwrite its value and a TAB skips over it.

underline

Displays the characters in the field with underscores.

unprotect

Sets the field so that the user can overwrite its value.

You can combine set statement values, inserting a comma to separate options such as cursor and full. Be aware that some values are contradictory or potentially redundant, and that EGL runs each modifier in order, moving left to right.

In the following example, the cursor property for the customerName field is reset to its initial value.

set myTextForm.customerName initial, cursor;