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Geethanjali's avatar
Geethanjali
Occasional Contributor
5 years ago

Extracting Text from iseries (mainframe-green screen) applications

Hello    Has anyone have experience in extracting specific text from Mainframe applications. I have already enabled Text Recognition through which am able to automate entering values. But am strugg...
extracttextfrommainframes
greenscreenapplicationautomation
iseriesAutomation
mainframeautomation
textrecognition
  • Geethanjali's avatar
    Geethanjali
    5 years ago

    hi  

     

    I have resolved this issue. 

     

    I tried OCR, but that didnot help me much because it provided me a chunk of data from the screen and I felt it really difficult to extract the specific data. Not sure if it had more effective ways 

     

    The solution which worked out for me was 

    Used text recognition in order to recognise the AS400 window. 

    Used key strokes for keying in the data

    used the feature ( Edit - Send to scratch pad) option in AS400 after which I recogonised that scratch pad window to get the details displayed. Since the positions and length are fixed I used relative positioning and length to extract the data. 

    Tried for couple of screens, it has worked.Have to see how it progresses. 

     

BenoitB's avatar
BenoitB
Community Hero

You must do OCR on specific region and specify to the ocr routine the font used.

Size of as400 screen is fixed and fields position too.

Use it to make template of each screen to manipulate.

Geethanjali's avatar
Geethanjali
Occasional Contributor
5 years ago

Hello, Thanks very much for your reply.. are there methods to extract text with the give rowid and columnid from the mainframe screen ?

 

I don't have Intelligent Quality add in installed. 

Is there any other way to do it or do we only require OCR to be enabled ?

Thanks very much

 

Thanks 

S.Geethanjali

  • BenoitB's avatar
    BenoitB
    Community Hero
    5 years ago

    Without Intelligent Quality you can still have OCR

    Read more on this article (the deprecated one)

    https://support.smartbear.com/testcomplete/docs/testing-with/deprecated/ocr/required-plug-ins.html

    But since the new ocr appeared it seems that the old OCR was lowered in quailty (this is my personal feeling) so it doesn't works as well as in the past.

     

    But you can also use regions checkpoint (so using image fragment).

    Here as the interface is very stable and pixels colors are well defined it could be a good alternative.

    So build a library of Regions corresponding to your main fields ...

    Or even more touchy but sexier, built on the fly the image fragment from the desired text.. -> Create a bitmap object with background color the same as your terminal background color, use Win32Api to write on this bitmap with the same font/color as the terminal .. and you'll have way to avoid building a large library of Regions ...

     

    sonya_m  This could be a very intersting technical challenge

    function CreateRegionFromString(MyString, FontObject, Background (color or other bitmap)) {

      return a bitmap that can be directly used with Region.Check

    }

    • Geethanjali's avatar
      Geethanjali
      Occasional Contributor
      5 years ago

      This is interesting .. I might have to experiment a bit . 

       

      While I try to enable the old OCR - it mentions that it is conflicting with some other addins.. So not sure if installing this will create some issues to any other addins. - Any thoughts here ?

       

      I was trying to use region check point . but since it compares pixel by pixel, would I be able to compare the text displayed ? - I have not tried it but since I was skeptical i didnot proceed.

       

      Other option of yours is very interesting and challenging too.. Let me see if I can try that out

       

      Thanks very much for your thoughts on this issue. 

       

      Thanks 

      S.Geethanjali

      • sonya_m's avatar
        sonya_m
        SmartBear Alumni (Retired)
        5 years ago

        BenoitB , thank you for the challenge idea! We'll consider adding it🙂

         

        Geethanjali please keep sharing your progress with us on this one!