Optional versus non-optional screen recognition criteria

You can select whether the screen recognition criteria you set is optional or non-optional. If you do not select the Optional check box, the recognition criterion is considered non-optional. How you use the Optional check box corresponds to the Host On-Demand screen descriptor attribute, optional.

If you have both optional recognition criteria and non-optional recognition criteria, ZIETrans checks the non-optional criteria first. If all the non-optional criteria match, the screen matches. If at least one of the non-optional criteria does not match, ZIETrans checks the optional criteria. For a screen to match the criteria, ZIETrans must find all non-optional criteria, or at least one optional criterion. Otherwise, the screen fails to match. The following example explains this concept in greater detail.

Note: Non-optional does not mean required.

Suppose you defined cursor position location and two text strings with the values shown in the following example:

Cursor position recognition  Optional     
                             Row: 1   Column: 1

String recognition           Non-optional   
                             String 1: Welcome
                             Start position: Row: 1   Column: 6
                             End position:   Row: 1   Column: 12

                             String 2: Username
                             Start position: Row 20   Column 10
                             End position:   Row 20   Column 17

In this example, ZIETrans must find both text strings or the cursor position for the screen to match. Because ZIETrans checks non-optional criteria first, ZIETrans looks for the text strings first. If ZIETrans cannot find both text strings in the specified regions of the host screen, then it checks to see whether the optional criterion (cursor position) can be found.