The names of the Ispec fields that are used in the GenericClass COM+ Interface are defined as a series of “Field Description Files” — one per Ispec. These field description files are XML files and are contained within a folder called Interfaces\ProtocolAdapters amongst the deployed system files. The XML file names have the format <ispec name>-FieldDesc.xml. These XML files are generated for each ispec as a part of the build process from Developer. The XML files contain details of an ispec transaction interface along with corresponding attributes and mask definitions if any. The GenericClass component creates a GenericClass object for each ispec at runtime. The GenericClass component passes transaction data including mask definitions if applied in the model. Refer to the Agile Business Suite Developer User Guide for more information about the configuration properties that can be used to enable a mask definition for an attribute.
For most user-defined Ispec fields, the name is simply the attribute name, for example, “NAME”, “ADDRESS”. The system-defined Ispec fields that appear on the top line of ispecs are all prefixed with an underscore, for example, “_ISPEC”, “ _INPUT_DATE”, “_ACTMTH”, “_UserMAINT”. Inherited, inserted or aggregated fields have a name that is qualified with the class name and attribute name of the owning class and attribute. The dollar character ‘$’ is used as the qualification character. An example from the SAMPLE system is “ACTION_LINE$ACTION_LINE$ACTION”.
There are a number of special fields that are used to pass information via the GenericClass object. The names of these special fields begin and end with an exclamation character, for example, “!CURSOR!”. Some of the useful special fields are:
!CURSOR! — Contains the name of the field in which the cursor should be placed.
!CURSORCOPY! — When placing the cursor in a copied field, this contains the copy number.
!ISPECALIAS! — The alias (i.e. short five-character name) of the Ispec.
!TEACH! — The name of a Teach screen, if a Teach screen has been recalled.
!TEACHALIAS! — The alias (i.e. short five-character name) of a Teach screen, if a Teach screen has been recalled.
!LANGID! — The language ID in a multi-language system.
The value of these special fields can be retrieved via the GetValue() method. For example,
pOutput->GetValue( L"!CURSOR!" );