Giving your Legacy Applications a Makeover

Giving your Legacy Applications a Makeover

Giving your Legacy Applications a MakeoverDoug Evans and Detlef Lexut

GDT 2008 International User ConferenceAugust 10 – 13 Lake Las Vegas, Nevada

Legacy Makeover

This course will demonstrate how easy it is to enhance your legacy online applications without touching your COBOL programs. Through the variety of emulators used by the end users over the past years, many unique processes have been developed to aid in the productivity for the users. We will show you how to manipulate the ASP (active server page) and VBS (visual basic script) and JS (jave script) files to create unique processes under the NVT emulation.



Legacy Makeover

We will be tackling two actual user request that will allow the users to: Create “Hot Keys” to instantly fill in form fields at

the press of a key Reset / Clear Form Fields at the press of a key



Legacy Makeover

GDT Thin Client User Interface



Understanding the Basics

Deployment No Software Setup or Configuration of User’s PC Single copy of Software on Server

NVT.OCX and ASP/ASPX scripts on Web Server

Automatic Update of new versions New build versions detected & downloaded by Internet

Explorer onto the client workstation

User Customization Preferences stored as 'cookies' on User PC




Internet Component Download Script Entries

Const NVT_BUILD = nnn <object id="NVT" … codebase="obj/nvt.ocx#Version=3,0,0,<%=NVT_BUILD%>“

Download Mechanism PC checked for reference to nvt.ocx and version If no nvt.ocx or an older version, then IE will automatically

download or prompt for download of new object depending on browser settings.

See IE Tools/Internet Options/Settings/View Objects




Standard Scripts NVT.ASP (customize as NVT_xxxxx.ASP) EYESYS_NVT.VBS Client-side script EYESYS_NVT.JS files Example Web Server URLs http://production/eyesys/nvt_acme.asp http://testsrv/eyesys/nvt_acme.asp

Active Server Page programming is becoming more popular as programming migrates online. ASP is a web server technology from Microsoft that lets developers program interactive parts into web pages using a variety of code languages or scripts.

ASP works with your Windows environment as well as your browsers to allow users to do a variety of things online.



Sample User Interfaces

This is the standard issued screen. You have the ability to change some options dynamically. You can change other options via the script. Layout is resolved during the migration process.




The request by this Customer’s users were the following:

Show Company Logo Remove Function Key

Buttons Distinguish Production

system versus Test system

Change the Default Colors





No company Logo Re-labeled function keys Custom color scheme ability Username to be saved in

cookies Reset Logon Button Auto Connection Navigation Place the user at a

designated screen following the login

Buttons that map to transactions

Application retains the last reference





Use of “Hot Key” setup

Use of “Clear Fields” button to erase contents of fields on a form



The “Hot Key” Example

By pressing the button, a window will be presented at the bottom of the session window that will allow the user to enter the “Hot Key” information.



The “Hot Key” ExampleModifying the .ASP

This shows the HTML code used for the hot key mapping . Here you can see that when someone focuses away from a text field it will execute a JS function “save_macros()”. On keypress it will validate what the user enters to make sure that a reserved char used for delimiting the pairs in the cookie is not being used.



The “Hot Key” ExampleModifying the .ASP

Above that HTML you will find the HTML for the input button “Quick Strings”.



The “Hot Key” ExampleModifying the .JS

Three functions have been added to the Java Script. The first one is save_macros which will go through all of the text

fields and save the corresponding value pairs into the IE cookie. See function for more details.




The next function is the validateChar function which will ensure that the users don’t input a reserved character used as a delimiter.




The third function added is the “pasteMacroValue” function which will take the provided key and insert the corresponding value into the active field.




The checkKeys function is always executed on a keypress. This is used to launch many of the keycombinations available for EYESYS. As you see above, some of the code within the checkKeys function is to check for Alt and Shift keys being pressed. It will paste the string stored into the current location of NVT.



The “Hot Key” Solution

LIVE DEMONSTRATION



The “Clear Fields” Example

Press the Clear Fields button to erase contents in all fields on

the form.



The “Clear Fields” Example



The “Clear Screen” ExampleModifying the .ASP

The button Clear Fields is created. Upon click of the button, the function ClrFlds will be performed.




The function ClrFlds. Insert space into the field F? which if 10 fields on the screen, the first iteration of the FOR loop would be to insert spaces into F10.






References

http:/www.w3schools.com/tags/

Documents

Giving your Legacy Applications a Makeover