Mainframe screen scraping

[Jess]

I am trying to read the data from the mainframe screen sessions. can anyone help me or guide me how is it done.

 

Thank You

[water]

Depends on the emulation software you run.

[Jess]

@water.. I am using personal communications. Can You help me. I am not getting just how to give it a start.

 

Thanks

[water]

PC3270 provides an API (COM) to access the mainframe session.
IIRC this has been discussed a feew times on the forum - means: The search feature should return a few hits pointing you into the right direction.
Example:

 

[JLogan3o13]

Moved to the appropriate forum, please pay attention to where you post in the future:

 

[Jess]

@JLogan3o13.. I am sorry .. I will be careful next time.

[Jess]

@water.. I am sorry for asking again and again. I am not able to understand that how do we run the mainframe session. Like we write Run("calc.exe") for calculator . How do we do that for the mainframe sessions.

 

Thanks

[water]

The thread I posted above should give you an idea. It mentions 5250 (S/36, AS/400) but works the same way for 3270.
When PC is installed on your PC you call the HLLAPI DLL and the interact with the host session.
The thread shows a framework to handle all needed processing.

Do you have the PC3270 documentation available (or can you download it form the web)?
 

Edited January 19, 2018 by water

[Jess]

@water I searched on web. I got a pdf file. I will try it out again. I will get back again if I will need more guidance.

 

Thanks

[junkew]

Search forum for Hllapi.dll and you will find the posts on this subject

 

Edited January 19, 2018 by junkew

[Jess]

okay .. Thank you guys for the help..

[Jess]

Hi,

I am trying to write a script wherein I have to search for a text in the screen. Can anyone help me in that.. Thanks

[junkew]

what do you have so far.

The simple straight forward screenscraping approach

1. Send a select all (ctrl+a frequently) to the terminal
2. Send a copy all (ctrl+x) to the terminal
3. Use the clipboard functions to get your string in a variable

More complex is on the 3270 screens to get the colordetails. For that you have to emulate the terminal with hllapi.dll which you can read in IBM examples of visual basic or c# as given in other post.

 

[Jess]

Thanks @junkew. I will try with that

 

[Balaji12]

Hi,

I am trying to write a script to select the text at the specified coordinates.

example: like the word starts at the position 16, 10(row, column).

Can anyone help me out in this thing.

 

Thanks

[Jos]

Ok Jess or Balaji12, stick to this one thread from here on and also to the Jess account.

Jos

[junkew]

How far did you try?

If you screenscrape a screen you get 1 lengthy string with a certain length from your clipboard

Normally you can split that in pieces of 80 or 132 characters (and sometimes you get CRLF characters after each line)

Then its a simple math  (16 * linesize) + 10 to get your substring starting point

study clip*,  string* functions over here https://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/functions.htm

and probably you need controlsend/send to send ctrl+a, ctrl+c