I need to purchase some terminal emulation software. All our mainframe users used to be on VT320 dumb terminals, but nowadays it’s all Windows GUI terminal emulation.
I need to be able to write automation routines, but the mainframe software company won’t allow us to write to the database, so it has to be via screen-scraping and terminal emulation scripting. They’ve made this very difficult by changing the GUI from the old menu-driven style, to using point-and-click (more or less) selection, arrow-key driven scrolling, pop-up windows, etc. (The automation scripting language I’ve used until now just won’t handle these new-fangled innovations.)
The only software I know of that might work is ProComm Plus. I’ve browsed for software reviews & comparisons, and looked for terminal emulation & scripting software, but found nothing.
I’m looking for any suggestions/feedback on ProComm, or for alternative solutions.
Thanks much!
P.S. Wow! The new posting window is quite something!
TerraTerm Pro is a really good windows-based telnet program/terminal emulator which supports both VT320 and its own scripting language. It wouldn’t hurt to find and download it and see if it meets your requirements.
I’m doing scripts to automate database updates, i.e., I recently wrote scripts to update 80,000 registration records (twice each) rather than our data-entry folk having to make manual changes.
The company that owns our mainframe software provided a (very, *very * simplistic) scripting language when they first moved to the GUI windows. However, they’ve now made their own scripting obsolete and refuse to support it.
There’s theoretically a control object for their terminal emulation program, which should allow me to use VB or something to write scripts, but it’s never worked at all.
I did something similar about 6 years ago… I was doing data entry, which in this case meant creating a DB record for each day a patient was receiving care. If someone was there for two months, the data entry people had to create 60 records by hand. I quickly got tired of doing that, so I wrote a terminal emulator script that made it much easier.
I don’t remember exactly which program I used, but it might have been DynaComm. That program seems to have a scripting language with the dialog box and screen scraping features I remember.
I used Procomm’s Dynacomm software for TN3270 a couple of years back, working on the front-end for a provincal database with printer support through the associated print session. I don’t know if it supported mouse automation - all our stuff was text based. I’m pretty sure it does though.
We had a beta developer version since we required some new function and we were paying them mucho $$$. (I recall many a feature not conforming to specifications in that thing…) The control language is dead simple (no complex loop structures), but it was easy to learn and supports more complex stuff it you’re smart about it.
As has been mentioned, it does do screen scraping handily. If you ever… what was it? pause the screen and deny user input while you scrape… I think… that’s one I had to hit them over the head to make work properly.
The place I’m just starting at uses Rumba (fixed link) for a rather complex looking Win32 GUI front-end to a nation-wide DB.
