Screen Form Factor

Many of the legacy host applications were designed for access and view from a desktop. These applications not only rely upon the larger “screen real estate” associated with a desktop, typically 24 rows by 80 columns, but also a full keyboard. When these same applications are accessed from a handheld device using terminal emulation, they do not fit perfectly within the smaller screen size (¼ or ½ VGA) of a handheld device. This compromises application readability and user navigation. Users spend more time scrolling and panning on the handheld, rather than doing productive work. This is one reason why applications like “Terminal Services”, which give handheld users a view of a portion of desktop application, are unattractive.

One solution to this problem is to “scrape” necessary fields and data from the larger screen and reorganize these for display in a smaller handheld screen. This technique is called “screen reformatting” and it implies repositioning certain input fields and data and eliminating others, so they better fit in the smaller screen of the handheld devices. Such a solution requires computing intelligence doing the screen reformatting and managing inbound / outbound data so that it is correctly mapped between the right field on the host screen and the corresponding field in the reformatted screen.

Such screen reformatting intelligence is sometimes provided as a middleware component. This is an obsolete way to solve the problem as it forces dependency on an additional middleware component, which must be purchased and requires to be administered and maintained.

Our products have a built in screen reformat capability provided using the powerful scripting engine. A screen reformat script customized to your host application can be implemented to map both inbound and outbound data between the host application screen and the reformatted screen. This approach allows dynamic rendering of legacy host screens to any device form factor to happen right on the device itself without the need for any middleware. Although more applicable to legacy host applications, scripts can also be implemented to reformat and translate desktop HTML screens to fit on a handheld screen. Other scripts can be implemented to aggregate data from multiple host application screens into a single screen on the handheld terminal.

When using our products, we can assist you with a script, customized for your host application, which will reformat your host application screens for display on the handheld terminal. This will allow you to easily extend your host applications, originally developed for access from desktop PCs to handheld terminals with smaller screen displays and different keypad configurations.