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CLERITY MAINFRAME REHOSTING SOLUTIONS
UniKix 3270 Pathway Software Case Study
SUNSTAR - Shareholder Portfolio Valuation Application
As a mainframe CICS application, SUNSTAR has many different 3270 screen displays including log-on screens for the network, the system, the application and the function. Once within the application, the user can choose from many different functions, each of which displays different elements of the customers portfolio.
SunGard (the application owner) chose UniKix 3270 Pathway Software from Clerity, in order to significantly ease user log-on functions and create a new interface that navigated a dozen screens, pulling frequently used results from 6 separate 3270 screens.
Figure 1 below shows a selection of screens from the SUNSTAR application.
 Figure 1: A selection of SUNSTAR screens
Development process
Before diving into the creation of the 3270 navigation beans, one must first sit down and analyze the application. Analysis involves highlighting different paths through your application, noting down the information needed for input, and the ouput to be stored and displayed later. This is exactly what SunGard did - deciding upon a path that navigated through 12 different screens. The first 4 screens sign the user into the application. The next two screens are menus, followed by another 6 screens of customer information. It was decided that the new SUNSTAR application would be made up of several beans that built on top of one another - each bean leaving the terminal in the correct state and position for the next bean. It seemed logical to have one bean whose sole purpose would be to log the user on; another bean would select the menu options, with 3 additional beans used to drill down the customer information screens, extracting information from each one. The 5 navigation beans were created without writing a line of code by using UniKix 3270 Pathway software. The newly created beans were then dropped into an IDE and a new Java application created.
The new application contains a small amount of code to tie the beans together, provide some error handling, and extract and display the data. The main bulk of the code handles the presentation. The finished application can be seen in figure 2 below.
Figure 2: The new SUNSTAR application
Summary The new SUNSTAR application has only one input; an Account Number. The information that is now presented to the user consists of data retrieved from 6 screens of customer information.
Next Steps
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