News Group Posts

stallion switch screens

From: Jerad Stoops <jms@sofnet.com>
Subject: Re: WY-60 display problem
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 20:54:34 -0600
References: <tun172vq8oof1@corp.supernews.com> 

Jerad Stoops wrote:

> System Info:
> 
> OSR5.0.5
> Stallion Easy Connection Serial Boards (ISA internal card)
> WY-60 Dumb Terminals
> FoxBASE+ 2.1.2 Application
> 
> We have ran this setup for about two years. Many of the terminals have
> two sessions enabled on the stallion board. The user switches sessions
> using ctrl+e and ctrl+o on the dumb terminal keyboard.
> 
> When the user logs in it automatically starts our FoxBASE+
> application. Each users .profile is setup for wy-60 terminals.
> 
> At seemingly random times, when a user switches sessions (let's say
> from session A to session B), screen B gets completely munged....

<snip details>

Well, I called Stallion to see if they had seen this problem before. 
They hadn't. But during the conversation mention was made about how the 
terminal escape sequences were setup on the stallion board for 
switching sessions. I checked them and the only escape sequences 
present were only for switching the sessions, not to redraw the session 
after it had been switched.

I sat down and tested swapping sessions with this idea in mind and 
found that I could consistently reproduce the following results.

What was happening is that when the user would switch sessions the 
terminal would actually make the switch from session A to session B, 
but it would not redraw the screen to display session B. Without 
realizing what they were really doing the user would press the enter 
key which did two things; first it had the side effect of redrawing the 
screen and displaying session B, and second it acted on the FoxBASE+ 
application which was hidden from them before the redraw. If the 
"hidden" session had a screen running in the FoxBASE+ application and 
it had something like a menu or a selection grid going, in which the 
enter key would take them to another FoxBASE+ screen, it would appear 
that they were getting information displayed on the terminal from some 
unknown source, but really wasn't, it was just session B. Sometimes the 
terminal wouldn't redraw correctly because it didn't have the proper 
escape sequences sent to it and would display parts of session A and B 
inter-mixed on the screen.

I'm sure glad to get to the bottom of this. But it still leaves the 
curious problem about the line of text getting sent to the printer. Oh 
well... one thing at a time :-)

Thanks for the posts

Jerad
 

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