F P A I N T John Sinclair Mark Geib Inland Steel Company 10-Oct-1986 FPAINT is a screen designing and data entry system, complete with forms editor, that allows you to design screens interactively and separately from the job of designing the rest of a program. While this is conceptually somewhat similar to packages like FMS or TDMS, FPAINT generates code which performs the desired manipulations, rather than doing it interpretively at runtime as the DEC products do. FPAINT uses SMG$ routines to assure terminal independence under VMS. Using FPaint Screens - general considerations FPaint builds a package of FORTRAN subroutines that may be considered the abstraction of a data entry screen. Each screen has the following characteristics: - A five character name ( referred to below as ) - A specific height (in rows) and width (in columns) - A number of fixed text fields - A number of data fields of varying characteristics - A screen help line In addition, the following operations may be performed on a screen: - Clear - clear the area occupied by the screen - Display Text - display screen text - Display Data - display screen data field contents - Edit - begin edit of screen data fields - Validate - validate all screen data fields Using an FPaint screen successfully therefore depends on invoking the above routines properly and in the correct order.