Form Flow COMS SDF

The flow of form requests at runtime.

AMT-COBOL for A-Series uses the Psuedo-Conversational conversation model to send to and receive information from the Form as shown in the following flow diagram.

In AMT-COBOL the information in the COMS form buffer does not get automatically placed in the controls of the Form and vice versa. This task has to be performed by the Internet Information Server (IIS) when receiving a COMS form buffer from the Transaction Server and when sending user input back to the Transaction Server. Therefore each Form needs to contain a very small Cobol Program that will perform this task. This program is automatically created in the code editor when creating the Form.

The Procedure Division of this Program only needs to have two code sections, named 'WS-TO-FORM' and 'FORM-TO-WS'. The first section (WS-TO-FORM) will be performed by the IIS when the COMS form buffer is sent to the form, the second section (FORM-TO-WS) is performed when user input is sent to the Transaction Server as shown for both in the flow diagram below.

For more information about the WS-TO-FORM & FORM-TO-WS sections, see AMT-COBOL Form Code.