Window and Display Features: Field Specifications

Window and Display Features

Field Specifications

Both the WINDOW and DISPLAY statements accept field specifications. Field specifications have the following general form:

<positionals> field-operand <format> <field-options> ;

Positionals

The positionals are directives specifying the position on the screen in which to begin the field. There are four kinds of positionals, any number of which are accepted for each field operand. Positionals are the following:

# operand: specifies the row position; that is, it moves the current position to column 1 of the specified line. The operand is either a number, a variable name, or an expression in parentheses. The expression must evaluate to a positive number.
/: instructs IML to go to column 1 of the next row.
@ operand: specifies the column position. The operand is either a number, a variable name, or an expression in parentheses. The @ directive should come after the pound sign (#) positional, if it is specified.
+ operand: instructs IML to skip columns. The operand is either a number, a variable name, or an expression in parentheses.

Field Operands

The field-operand specifies what goes in the field. It is either a character literal in quotes or the name of a character variable.

Formats

The format is the format used for display, for the value, and also as the informat applied to entered values. If no format is specified, the standard numeric or character format is used.

Field Options

The field-options specify the attributes of the field as follows:

PROTECT=YES
P=YES: specifies that the field is protected; that is, you cannot enter values in the field. If the field operand is a literal, it is already protected.
COLOR=operand: specifies the color of the field. The operand can be either a literal character value in quotes, a variable name, or an expression in parentheses. The colors available are WHITE, BLACK, GREEN, MAGENTA, RED, YELLOW, CYAN, GRAY, and BLUE. The default is BLUE. Note that the color specification is different from that of the corresponding DATA step value because it is an operand rather than a name without quotes.

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