Specifying validity checking for replies

You can specify (parameters are given in parentheses):

• Type of reply (TYPE)
  • Decimal (*DEC)
  • Character (*CHAR)
  • Alphabetic (*ALPHA)
  • Name (*NAME)
• Maximum length of reply (LEN)
  • For decimal, 15 digits (9 decimal positions)
  • For character and alphabetic, 32 characters
  • For name, 10 characters
  Note: If you do not specify any validity checking (VALUES, RANGE, REL, SPCVAL, DFT), the maximum length of a reply is 132 characters for types *CHAR and *ALPHA.
• Values that can be used for the reply
  • A list of values (VALUES)
  • A list of special values (SPCVAL)
  • A range of values (RANGE)
  • A simple relationship that the reply value must meet (REL)
  Note: The special values are values that can be accepted but that do not satisfy any other validity checking values.

When a display station user enters a reply to a message, the keyboard is in lower shift which causes lowercase characters to be entered. If your program needs the reply to be in uppercase characters, you can do one of the following things:

• Use the SNDUSRMSG command which supports a translation table option which defaults to converting lowercase to uppercase.
• Require the display station user to enter uppercase characters by specifying only uppercase characters for the VALUES parameter.
• Specify the VALUES parameter as uppercase and use the SPCVAL parameter to convert the corresponding lowercase characters to uppercase.
• Use TYPE(*NAME) if the characters to be entered are all letters (A-Z). The characters are converted to uppercase before being checked.