An external terminal can communicate to the application by a direct COMS window, provided that the terminal has the capability to be programmed to construct and transmit a transaction in the format required by your application, and the capability to receive and handle unformatted output returned by your application (that is, output without embedded terminal control characters).

You cannot send an Automatic Entry to a NOF terminal. The NOF terminal interface only supports transaction initiation at the terminal.

The figure below illustrates this interface method.

NOF Terminal Interface

You must declare the terminal as a NOFORM type station. You can do this either by updating the installation data for your terminal in COMS Utility or using the Monitor Utility (LINC/MON).

The COMSTP program does not embed terminal control characters when transmitting output to a NOFORM terminal; however, the first byte of the output message is always a DC1 character (in hexadecimal). NOFORM-type terminals are treated in all other respects as normal terminals. For example, COMS Transaction Mode is enforced.