HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
LAYOUT A NEW FORM
Once you press ENTER to record the form characteristics, FORMSPEC clears
the screen. As shown in Figure 2-5, a message appears briefly in the
upper left corner of the screen. When the message disappears, it leaves
the screen as a blank pallet, ready for you to layout a new form. To
layout the form, you need to remember only two rules:
1. Delimit all fields. Any area in which you want data entered is
called a field. Use brackets ([]) to indicate the beginning and
end of each field. Or, if you do not want the field delimiters to
appear on the form, press ESCAPE before typing each bracket.
Combining ESCAPE and [ indicates the start of a field. Similarly,
combining ESCAPE and ] indicates the end of a field. When
preceded by ESCAPE, the brackets do not appear on the form and do
not take up any room; for this reason they are called nonprinting
brackets. With either printing or nonprinting brackets, you can
fill the field with dots (periods) so you can see the extent of
the field. The dots only appear during form layout; they are not
shown when the form is displayed by ENTRY.
2. Name each field within the delimiters. A field name, called the
field tag, must be typed inside the field delimiters. This tag
can be upper or lower case letters or a combination of upper and
lower case. The first character must be a letter, but other
characters may be letters, the numbers from 0-9, or an underline
(_).
All other considerations of form layout are aesthetic. During form
layout, you can use all the terminal edit and display group keys and the
cursor control keys (as described in your terminal reference manual).
These keys allow you to move freely around the screen inserting or
deleting lines and characters and moving the fields around until you are
satisfied with how the form appears. Do not enable automatic line feed
(Auto LF) while running FORMSPEC.
![[]](../../pic3k/M010584/S2FORM43c50.gif)
Figure 2-6. The Form Layout for the ShipTo Form
Action
Layout the form as shown in Figure 2-6; the positions of the fields are
defined in Table 2-1.
Each field into which the user can enter data has been delimited by
printing brackets. Within these brackets, a field tag names each field.
For example, ordate identifies the field into which a date is entered,
and name identifies the field into which the customer name is entered.
The other field tags are address, city, st, zip, and phone. These tags
never appear when the form is displayed. All the other text, which
consists of the title and the labels on the fields, will be displayed
exactly as it is typed on the screen during form layout.
Table 2-1. Defining the Fields for the ShipTo Form
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| | | | |
| Field | Tag | Line No. | Length |
| | | | |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| | | | |
| Date | ordate | 5 | 18 |
| | | | |
| Name | name | 10 | 42 |
| | | | |
| Address | address | 11 | 42 |
| | | | |
| City | city | 12 | 30 |
| | | | |
| State | st | 12 | 2 |
| | | | |
| Zip | zip | 13 | 10 |
| | | | |
| Telephone | phone | 13 | 14 |
| | | | |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action
When the form is laid out to your satisfaction, press ENTER to record it
in the forms file.
The next step is to proceed to the Field Menu for the first field on this
form.
![[]](../../pic3k/M010584/S2FORM53c50.gif)
Figure 2-7. The Field Menu for the Date Field