Taking Care of PC5250 Popup Keypad Problems

Published: June 10, 2009

Hey, Joe:

We just ghosted and sent out 20 new PCs with iSeries Access for Windows V5R4M0 on them. Now we're getting complaints that the Popup Keypads on the new machine's PC5250 display sessions aren't working correctly. On the old PCs, we had three Popup Keypads available to the users. The new PCs only have two keypads and some of the functions are missing. What's going on?

--Beth

I suspect your problem isn't so much that things have changed; it's that the Popup Keypad configuration went back to its default settings with the new install. Here's what I think happened.

For readers who aren't familiar with the Popup Keypad, it's a simple iSeries Access for Windows function that lets you quickly insert or run specific keystrokes, functions, and macros inside the keypad's accompanying PC5250 green-screen session. You simply right-click on any section of your current PC5250 screen and a keypad appears. The keypad's buttons contain a number of simple i5/OS functions such as PageUp, PageDown, Enter, Reset, Attn, and SysReq. Click on any of the buttons and that same function is performed on the 5250 interactive job that the session is currently running. What's more, you can configure up to four different Popup Keypads for any of your PC5250 sessions, with the keypads labeled Pad 1, Pad 2, Pad 3, and Pad 4.

A typical PC5250 Popup Keypad looks something like this:

You can select whichever keypad you want to use by clicking on the appropriate Pad radio button (Pad 1, Pad 2).

For most configurations, the default Popup Keypad settings are contained in a file called Default.PMP, which can be found in the iSeries Access\Emulator\Private directory. Your Popup Keypad settings can be changed from within a PC5250 session by clicking on Edit→Preferences&rarr PopUp Keypad from the PC5250 menu bar. This brings you to the following Popup-Keypad Setup screen.

Here's where you'll find the name of your Popup Keypad file. For most people, the file is called Default.PMP. You can also customize your Popup Keypad file on this screen by clicking on the Customize button, which will bring you to the following Customize Popup Keypad screen.

On this screen, you can change the number of Popup Keypads that are available to your user (up to a maximum of four keypads), the size attributes of the Popup Keypad screen, which functions are available on which keypad buttons, and the colors that are used when the keypads are displayed. You can do this by clicking on the appropriate tab on the Customize Popup Screen and then changing the values listed under each item. This screen is also where I suspect we'll find the answer to your problem.

First, remember you said that on your old PCs, the users were able to bring up three Popup Keypads when they right-clicked on the screen, but that the configurations on your new ghosted installs only display two possible PopUp Keypads. This is because two keypads is the default configuration when installing iSeries Access new onto a PC. My suspicion is that somewhere along the way, someone had customized the Popup Keypad settings in the Default.PMP file on your organization's old PCs. This customization probably added a third popup keypad and additional functions that the users can access on that keypad. You can confirm this by looking at the Number of Pads setting under the Number of Poppad Keypads tab on the Customize Popup Keypad screen. If that number is equal to "2" on your new ghosted machines, you are probably running the default configuration on that screen.

The simple solution is to make the iSeries Access Popup Keypads on your new ghosted machines match the Popup Keypads on your older PCs running iSeries Access. There are two ways to do this. You can use the Customize Popup Keypad function to modify the Default.PMP files on each of the new machines or you can copy the Default.PMP file from one of your old PCs to each of the new ghosted machines. My preference would be to copy the old file to the new machines because then you will be sure that each machine has all the same settings as the old machines. Recreating the file on each machine is more work and the process is more error-prone, so go with the easier solution and copy the file over by performing the following steps:

• On your source machine (one of the old PCs), go into the iSeries Access for Windows \Emulator\Private folder. In the product's default configuration, that folder would be found at the following location under the root directory of your hard drive.

x:\Program Files\IBM\Client Access\Emulator\Private\

Where x:\ is equal to the drive letter where iSeries Access for Windows is installed. The folder may be different on your PCs, depending on how you installed iSeries Access for Windows.

• Copy the Default.PMP file from the source machine onto a drive that your target machines can access.

• Rename the Default.PMP file on your target machine in case you want to restore it later.

• Copy the file you lifted from the source machine into the \Emulator\Private directory on the target machine (the new ghosted PC). The next time your restart your PC5250 software and bring up the Popup Keypad, it should have all the same settings that were present on your source machine.

And this procedure should solve your problem.

HTH

--Joe

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