Developing a dialog

A developer, using an editor such as the PDF editor in Option 2 of ISPF, develops a dialog by creating its various elements at a terminal and storing them in libraries. You can use any available editor when creating dialog elements.

However, in addition to an editor, ISPF provides special facilities to aid dialog development. Examples of these facilities are:

• A VIEW facility for displaying source data or output listings
• Utilities to simplify data handling
• Programming-language processing facilities
• Edit models for messages, file-tailoring skeletons, panels, and DTL source
• Library access services for accessing both ISPF libraries and other data sets.

Figure 1 shows a developer using ISPF to create and test dialog elements. As shown in the figure, panel definitions, message definitions, and file-tailoring skeletons are created before running the dialog. These dialog elements are saved in libraries. The developer stores the program (after compilation) or command procedure in an appropriate system program library. During dialog testing, tables of data, log entries, and file-tailoring output data sets can be created by dialog processing. ISPF creates the log data set the first time the user performs some action that results in a log message, such as saving edited data or submitting a job to the batch machine. ISPF creates the list data set the first time a user requests a print function or runs a dialog that issues a LIST service request.

When the developer completes the functions, panel definitions, and any other dialog elements required by the application being developed, the dialog is ready to be processed under ISPF.