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Terminal Automation

The Terminal Automation plugin lets you automate legacy terminal (green-screen) applications by connecting to a host over telnet and interacting with the screen directly. It supports starting a terminal session, reading text from a given row and column position, setting data at a position, and closing the session — through the Start, Get, Set, and Stop steps. The plugin connects using the terminal host address and its telnet port (usually 23, or 992 for SSL). Use this plugin when your workflows need to read from or drive IBM mainframe or AS/400 applications that have no API available.

Prerequisites
  • The terminal host must be reachable on its telnet port (usually 23, or 992 for SSL).
  • A terminal emulator such as tn5250 or IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS) is needed only while building the workflow, to read the row and column numbers off the screen. It is not needed when the workflow runs.
  • Get the following external JARS from IBM machine- Host Access Toolkit: habasen2, hacp, hodbasen2, hoddbg2. Copy these jars to PS and AE lib directories to run terminal automation steps.
Note
  • A Terminal Automation: Start step must run before any Get or Set step, and a Terminal Automation: Stop step should run after the last one. They may be in the same workflow, or in separate workflows of the same process.
  • The Stop step closes the session only if it receives at least one row. If no row reaches it, the terminal session stays open on the host.
  • Terminal Automation steps must run one at a time, in sequence. Don't rely on Process Studio's default parallel execution for these steps. Process Studio runs all workflow steps in parallel threads by default. Terminal Automation steps share a single terminal session. If two steps run at the same time, one step might read the screen while another step is writing to it. This can cause errors or unpredictable results. To avoid this issue, configure your workflow so that Terminal Automation steps execute sequentially.
Limitations
  • For certain cases like wrong input, instance specific or unknown error, the plugin may not provide any error message or exception. (For e.g. if a wrong property name is provided in the Start step it does not provide any exception or error.)
  • Additional delays can be required before the step in the workflow as per the terminal response.

Common Action Buttons:

Field NameDescription
OKOn click of this button, all field values are checked. If any required field values are missing, then it displays validation error message. If all the required field values are provided, then it saves the field values.
At design-time in Process Studio, a consolidated error message for all rows for any missing values from the Input Table/Tab above is displayed whereas at run time in AutomationEdge UI error messages for each row will be displayed.
CancelOn click of this button, it will cancel the window and do not save any values.
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