BCD Presto – Software Green Screen Modernization

aka – AS400 iSeries 5250 Screen to Web Conversions

BCD Presto is probably my favourite screen modernization tool. It has a very simple and clean screen editor. It’s reliable, fast and intuitive. Most importantly, when I have those “what is the best way to do this?” questions the BCD helpdesk folks are helpful and super fast in their responses: They really have gone above and beyond in helping me to workout some of the not-so-obvious screen tweaks I have wanted to do.

Running Presto in automatic screen modernization mode nicely picks up each green screen and automatically apples the basic skin layout (the webpage theme I have chosen). This shows a webpage to the user in real time. It has some core rules like “recognize this is a menu and convert all menu options into clickable links”. This works great but, for one of my clients, some of their menu links are alphameric — for example WO means “Load Works Order”. These are not recognized by the “Presto Rules”. I could change the rules to include that, but since this is only a handful of menus I can edit the page instead.

Using javascript to make links clickable in AS400 menus

This is the code you need to add for the CLICK action:

jQuery("#f0").val("WO");
SendRequest("EN");

obviously, you will need to change the #f0 to the name of the input field on  your menu!