You should check with the vendors of your version of Attachmate Extra!, to see if they have API information available. This might make your job easier, if you can 'talk' directly to the mainframe window. If not, these thoughts may help:
A standard mainframe screen is 25 rows of 80 columns. I'm assuming that the information which you want to 'screen scrape' is in a fixed position, e.g. a Customer ID is always displayed on the third row, starting in column 10, and seven characters long.
Through VBA, you should be able to:
-- Activate the mainframe window
-- Copy the window to the clipboard
-- In Access VBA, use
DoCmd.RunCommand acCmdPaste to paste the clipboard into e.g. a text box on a form (set to memo format so it can hold 2,000 characters of text).
-- Now treat this as a string which is exactly 2000 characters long.
-- Work out where each field appears in the string
-- Use
Mid$ to extract it into a variable
Example for my Customer ID mentioned earlier:
-- row 3 is characters 161 to 240 of the screen
-- the Customer ID will start at position 170
Code:
strCustomerID = mid$(txtMainframe,170,7)
I hope that these thoughts are of some help.
Bob Stubbs