Profound Logic Forums

I'm very new to profound. The web facing for our product (where I work) has all been done using profound ui. Before now, we (they) haven't really explored using universal displays a whole lot. I've put together a couple and think they're great. It seems like a huge effort to convert all our screens to this new method, but perhaps a piece at a time, over time would be okay. What I'm wondering is, and please excuse my naivete as I'm not even sure I'm asking the right question, is if it's possible to invoke a universal screen like you would a regular profound screen.

Let me see if I can clarify.... Let's say I have an rpg program TEST0001 which has a profound ui display (not universal). There is a button on that screen that triggers in the rpg program a call to another rpg program named TEST0002. Let's say TEST0002 is set up as a universal display with html of just a div and some contents in that div. If I type in the url for TESTER0002 directly in the browser, (http://server:8080/profoundui/auth/universal/TESTER2), map it correctly, and include the full html doctype, html, head, and body it opens just fine. But invoking it from TEST0001, whether it has the whole html or just a div, doesn't work. There are no errors either.

As I mentioned, it would be a huge undertaking to convert our whole product to universal displays as a whole (assuming all would have to be universal displays or not - no mixing and matching)... but it would be nice to do it piecemeal.

Can anyone steer me in the right direction?

If by "regular profound screen", you are talking about Rich Display Files, UDFs are not meant to replace them. UDFs must be called from a URL. They don't use the same sessions as RDF programs. You would use UDFs to provide text-based content--some examples of which are mentioned here: http://www.profoundlogic.com/docs/displ ... play+Files .

Conversely, Rich Display File programs can be loaded from Genie or from other Rich Display programs. You can use Visual Designer to create interactive RDF screens easily, and you can choose from a variety of widgets to create a User Interface.

IMHO, Universal Display Files were poorly named. In development, we used the term "Universal Handler" which is a better term. Maybe the best would be something like "Universal Document Generator"

UDFs are not display files in the traditional sense. They are just a way of creating a document from RPG. This can be a CSV, HTML, JSON or XML document -- or, really, any text document you can envision. You can save that text file to the IFS, or you can have a URL that maps to your program so that the text document can be returned via HTTP.

Yeah, I get that it's possible to use it to generate an HTML file that's sent to a browser, and therefore create a type of display, that's only one of many possible uses!