Does HostBridge do “screen scraping” under the covers?
Absolutely not! The whole idea behind HostBridge is to eliminate “screen scraping.” The data that HostBridge receives from the application (via 3270 Bridge) is not formatted for display on the screen. It is simply a data structure (called the ADS). The ADS contains no row/column coordinates. It contains only the contents, and certain attributes, of the variable fields on the screen. The ADS is the data structure that a program passes to CICS when it makes a BMS call, such as SEND MAP. One fact that is often overlooked is that CICS applications that use BMS don’t “think” in terms of rows and columns. That is an abstraction created by BMS. The application code thinks in terms of fields and values. By circumventing BMS and the 3270 data streams it generates/expects, and replacing it with an XML document that carries just field names and values, we allow the host application and the middle-tier application to “think” exactly the same way. ^ Back to Top With HostBridge, how and when are fie
