Claims
- 1. An apparatus comprising:at least one processor; a memory coupled to the at least one processor; a plurality of screen formats residing in the memory, each screen format corresponding to a display screen that may be displayed on a dumb terminal; a computer program residing in the memory and executed by the at least one processor, the computer program generating from the plurality of screen formats a plurality of object-oriented screen classes that correspond to the plurality of screen formats.
- 2. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the computer program generates from each screen format a corresponding object oriented screen class.
- 3. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the plurality of object-oriented screen classes each include a plurality of object methods that allow a client to interact with data that corresponds to data on a display screen.
- 4. The apparatus of claim 3 wherein the plurality of object methods include:a loadParms( ) object method that loads the parameters for the display screen in the host-based application; a getInputField( ) object method that retrieves the data from a specified input field in the display screen in the host-based application; an addResponseField( ) object method that compiles user input into different fields in the display screen in the host-based application; a sendResponse( ) object method that sends all user input to the host-based application; and a getNextScreen( ) object method that retrieves the next screen from the host-based application.
- 5. A method for providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for an existing host-based application, the method comprising the steps of:automatically generating a plurality of object oriented screen classes from a plurality of pre-existing screen formats, each pre-existing screen format corresponding to a display screen that may be displayed on a dumb terminal; and modifying the plurality of screen classes to define a plurality of screens in the GUI.
- 6. The method of claim 5 wherein the step of automatically generating the plurality of screen classes comprises the step of automatically generating from each pre-existing screen format a corresponding screen class.
- 7. The method of claim 5 wherein the plurality of screen classes each include a plurality of object methods that allow a client to interact with data that corresponds to data on a display screen for the existing host-based application.
- 8. The method of claim 7 wherein the plurality of object methods include:a loadParms( ) object method that loads the parameters for the display screen in the host-based application; a getInputField( ) object method that retrieves the data from a specified input field in the display screen in the host-based application; an addResponseField( ) object method that compiles user input into different fields in the display screen in the host-based application; a sendResponse( ) object method that sends all user input to the host-based application; and a getNextScreen( ) object method that retrieves the next screen from the host-based application.
RELATED APPLICATION
This patent application is a divisional of Ser. No. 08/974,121, U.S. Pat. No. 6,064,382, “Object Oriented Apparatus And Method For Providing a Graphical User Interface For Host-based Software Applications”, filed on Nov. 19, 1997, which is incorporated herein by reference.
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