Display characteristics of the enhanced 3270 interface

The enhanced 3270 user interface has some display characteristics that you should be aware of.

Hexadecimal numbers sorted as strings

There are attributes that are stored as strings but represent other underlying data format, such as hexadecimal numbers, and therefore produce unexpected results when sorted.

For example, the Channel Number attribute in the OSA Express3 Port Errors attribute group (KN3THE) is stored as a string and sorts correctly as a string. But the string represents a hexadecimal number and you might expect this value to sort as a hexadecimal number. The following shows channel numbers sorted in ascending order:

D4
D6
FC
FF
F2
30

Unexpected zeros

There are attributes that are displayed as blanks in the Tivoli® Enterprise Portal interface, but display as zeros in the enhanced 3270 interface.

For example, for the Time Stamp for Highest Conns attribute, the enhanced 3270 interface shows 00/00/00 00:00:00 when there have been no active connections. But the attribute definition says when the application has had no active connections, this value is stored as a character string of zeros and displayed as blank.