Attachmate receive host string and react with conditional response using VBA - vba

Question

Using Attachmate, I am trying to write a VBA script that reacts when a specific phrase occurs and automatically executes commands via inline commands. Essentially, when a phrase appears, an inputbox appears asking the user for a specific quantity and the VBA code takes that quantity, inserts it into the terminal and then jumps around different menus to create an internal label. However, my problem is that I don't know how to have the VBA code react to the different strings that may be returned by the host. Sometimes it says "enter to continue" and sometimes it says "select user". So what I want it to do is based on the statement it receives to do a certain action, but I don't know what the command is for capturing what the terminal is receiving from the host. I've tried "waitforstring" and "readline" but it is obvious I am not using them correctly. Below is the code I have built thus far, please be gentle as it is still very unfinished. I have commented out several parts of it in attempts to troubleshoot my problems:
'variable declarations
Dim count As Long 'var used to indicate how many times code should loop (how many labels should be print)
Dim drugname As String
Dim qtyinput As Long
Dim CR As String ' Chr(rcCR) = Chr(13) = Control-M
Dim LF As String ' Chr(rcLF) = Chr(10) = Control-J
Dim strcheck As String
'assign values to variables
count = 0
CR = Chr(Reflection2.ControlCodes.rcCR)
LF = Chr(Reflection2.ControlCodes.rcLF)
qtyinput = InputBox("Number of items being sent", Quantity)
drugname = .GetText(22, 15, 22, 46) ' StartRow:=22, StartColumn:=15,EndRow:=22, EndColumn:=46 'copies text from screen
' Press EditCopy (Copy the selection and put it on the Clipboard).
'.Copy rcSelection, rcAsPlainText -- not needed
.Transmit qtyinput & CR
.Transmit CR
'strcheck = .readline("00:00:01")
'MsgBox strcheck
'If .WaitForString("Press " & Chr(34) & "RETURN" & Chr(34) & " to continue, " & Chr(34) & "^" & Chr(34) & " to stop: ") Then .Transmit CR
'Select Case strcheck
' Case strcheck Like "to continue"
' .Transmit CR
'Case strcheck Like "*Select CLIENT*"
' .Transmit CR
'End Select
.Transmit "^MED" & CR
.Transmit "3" & CR
.Transmit "10" & CR

Answer 1

First of all, Attachmate is the company, and they have a few products for accessing Mainframe sessions from Windows including EXTRA! and Reflections, both of which share a common scripting language, which is nice and easy to use from within VBA.
However, EXTRA! tends to have fewer commands available to use than Reflections, which is the more expensive product, so you have to get a little creative with your VBA.
I think you are using EXTRA!, so the command you are looking for is "GetString"
I use VBA to interact with a mainframe session in EXTRA!, and I know that my mainframe command is successful when three stars appear on the screen in a certain position.
The mainframe command can take anywhere between 1 second and 5 minutes to complete, so I use "GetString" to poll the mainframe session every second, waiting for the three stars before I continue:
Do Until Sess0.Screen.GetString(14, 2, 3) = "***"
Application.Wait (Now + TimeValue("0:00:01"))
Loop
The syntax for "GetString" is: GetString(Row, Column, Length)
In my case the stars appear at row 14, column 2, and I know there will always be 3 of them, so I set my string length to 3.