Strategies for scraping in multiple screens

My working environment included scraping 3270 emulator screens for a given list of key values. Often it appeared that these key value lists needed to be used to retrieve data from more than one screen. The modus operandi in our company was to write a separate screen scraper for each screen. It also occurred that various users might want different data from those screens, so the program would need to be modified in order to satisfy each user request.

So I thought, what if I could define each screen in a common table, where by supplying only the screen name, a program could know where to go to get each data element on the any defined screen.

Here are the Schema Table headers:
[pre]
ScrName Field FRM THR COL LEN TYP

where...
ScrName is the Screen Name
Field is a name defining the field
FRM is the first row for the field
THR is the last row for the field
COL is the column for the field
LEN is the length of the field
TYP is either NUM or CHR
[/pre]

Filling this table with correct data will require you to analyze each screen and capture the correct data for each field. Those fields that are editable will be easy, since you can TAB and fill the fields with xs or 9s. Display only fields may be more difficult to define although they may be the most important.

The output from your screen scraper program should then be directed to an Excel sheet/table exclusively for that screen. The screen table should have a heading for each Field in your Schema Table for that screen. So the idea here is that for any screen you retrieve ALL the data on the screen for every key value(s) entered.

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