Progress
Portability Guide


UNIX Environment Settings

The environment file or terminal definition file for UNIX character interfaces is called the PROTERMCAP file. This file is a text file that stores an entry for each supported terminal type and contains special feature definitions especially for use with Progress. Each terminal entry contains the commands and terminal descriptions that Progress uses to communicate with and control the terminal. Each entry includes the following five logical sections:

The PROTERMCAP environment variable ($DLC/protermcap) points to the PROTERMCAP file.

NOTE: There is a 4,096K limit on the size of each PROTERMCAP file.

Setting Up Your Terminal

Use your terminal’s setup mode to synchronize your terminal with the color and key code definitions in its PROTERMCAP file.

The PROTERMCAP file supplied with Progress has built-in definitions for many terminals. If your terminal is not included in the PROTERMCAP file supplied with Progress, you must make modifications to that file. Progress uses the shell variable PROTERMCAP to find the PROTERMCAP file. Progress looks for this file whenever you start the software in a UNIX environment.

Specifying Colors

You can specify up to 123 color fields in a terminal entry. At run time, Progress loads these color specifications into the color table.

Each table row performs two semantic functions-defining a foreground/background color pair and mapping that color pair to an integer from 5 to 127. Integers are used by the application to reference colors assigned to a widget. (An application typically assigns two color pairs to a widget-one pair for display mode and one pair for prompt mode.)

Use the following syntax to specify a color field in a PROTERMCAP terminal entry:

SYNTAX
COLOR color-number
  [ color-name ]=start-sequence:stop-sequence: 

color-number

An integer from 5 to 127 that specifies the location of the color in the color table. The color number is the mechanism used to assign a color pair in an application.

color-name

The name of the color. You can use any value for color-name, except a Progress keyword. Although this is optional, including a name makes the color section of the terminal entry self-documenting (you cannot embed comments) and also makes the color specifications backward compatible.

start-sequence

The character sequence that starts the color attribute.

stop-sequence

The character sequence that stops the color attribute.

For example, the following fields from the Wyse 370 terminal section define color table locations 5 and 6:

COLOR 5 RED/BLACK=\E[31;40m:\E[m:\
COLOR 6 GREEN/BLACK=\E[32;40m:\E[m:\ 

Progress reserves color table locations 0 through 4 as follows:

NOTE: The PROTERMCAP file does not support spacetaking (embedded attribute) terminals. These are terminals that use spaces on the display to hold control codes for video and color capabilities. If you add support for such terminals, Progress ignores the capability when displaying an interface.


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