Turning off “Wy-60” in 4GL Informix?
سؤال
We have an Informix 4GL forms interface to our database, accessed using a terminal emulator running in WY-60 or "Wyse-60" terminal emulation mode.
From what I'm reading, where I would previously understood a "terminal" to just be a display of a text stream (e.g. Hyperterm), "WY-60" mode means that the software is emulating a 1980s-era computer, which is performing display operations based on the data sent within the text stream, resulting in a high degree (for the time) of graphical capability with only a very small expenditure of data traffic.
What I'm wondering is, what alternatives do I have to this in 4GL Informix?
The menu-driven interface of the 4GL forms will presumably require something better than a pure text-stream terminal... but how much work would it be to change from our current, proprietary (requiring expensive terminal emulation software) WY-60 type display to something else which could, for instance, work with the free PuTTY terminal software?
المحلول
There are all sorts of things to discuss here, but the basic answer is:
- Change the setting of the
TERM
environment variable to a different value fromwy-60
.
What are the issues:
- You need to know whether you are using
termcap
orterminfo
. This is controlled by theINFORMIXTERM
environment variable, which can be set totermcap
orterminfo
or could be unset in which case it defaults totermcap
. - You need to know where your alternative terminal description will come from.
- If you are using
termcap
, you will need to ensure that theTERMCAP
variable is set correctly, either to the name of file (default is/etc/termcap
; Informix provides a file in$INFORMIXDIR/etc/termcap
) or the text of the entry for the terminal. - If you are using
terminfo
, you can specify where the terminal entries are stored in theTERMINFO
environment variable. It will be a directory name; under that will be a series of directories each with a single character name (the first character of a terminal name), with the actual terminal descriptions in a file. Thus, ifTERMINFO=$HOME/terminfo
andTERM=wy-60
, theterminfo
code will look for the file$HOME/terminfo/w/wy-60
.
- If you are using
- You need to be sure that the relevant description for your new terminal is available. You can use any terminal type that is described by
termcap
orterminfo
. However, Informix does use some extra capabilities (documented in an appendix to the I4GL Reference Manual) undertermcap
. - You'll need to check that the I4GL program looks clean on your new terminal type.
You might look at xterm
or xterm-color
or ansi
or vt100
or any of a large number of other terminal types. The only reason to stay with Wyse 60 is that it is known to work.
نصائح أخرى
WY-60 (a.k.a. Altos 2 terminal) works the best. You also have the alternative of converting the char-based I4GL forms to GUI-based forms with IBM Informix Genero (I4GL-compatible).. I noticed you withdrew your question about connecting to Informix via Visual Studio.. Did you resolve that?