Designing and Programming CICS Applications

Chapter 12. Designing the Visual Basic Component

In this chapter:

• Understanding What the Component Needs to Do

• Designing the Graphical User Interface

• Designing the Print Function

• Designing the Online Help

• Designing the Data Validation

• Designing Access to and Control of the CICS Application

• Designing Error Handling

In Part I of the book, we looked at the various departments in the KanDoIT company, and their requirements for the new business application. Now let’s look in a little more detail at the customer services department.

The customer services department is, as its name implies, driven by KanDoIT’s customers. Typically, much of its work is following up customer account enquiries, most of which are received over the telephone. Sometimes customers will know their account number; often they won’t. Finding the correct information quickly is always going to be a critical need.

The purpose of the Visual Basic component is to provide the customer services department with an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), for their work with customer account records. Of course it’s important that representatives of the customer services department work closely with the Visual Basic programmers to ensure that the design of the GUI really meets the department’s requirements.

Understanding What the Component Needs to Do

In Chapter 4, we decided which services that the COBOL business logic component would provide within the sample application.

It would:

• Return the contents of a customer account record, ...