How to call 4gl from Perl

arunkumar.ceg has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I'm new to perl and 4GL. I am assigned a task to automate few things. I've a 4gl program which when executed, it is opening a screen where user has to press just F7, F8, F12 something like this. It will then navigate to different menus and different screen and does some functionality. My job is to automate these set of actions. My question is, how can I pass function key strokes to the 4GL executable and navigate through screens.

Comment on How to call 4gl from Perl

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Re: How to call 4gl from Perl by Corion (Patriarch) on Mar 20, 2017 at 18:55 UTC
What kind of screen is it? Telnet? Xterm? 3270 emulation? See Win32::GuiTest, X11::GUITest, Expect.	[reply]
Re^2: How to call 4gl from Perl by arunkumar.ceg (Initiate) on Mar 20, 2017 at 19:15 UTC
Thank you for your response! this is xterm	[reply]
Re: How to call 4gl from Perl by cbeckley (Curate) on Mar 21, 2017 at 01:13 UTC
Which 4gl is it? Is it PowerBuilder, Unify, Oracle Forms? What is the screen generation framework? Curses, X, some version of Windows? You're going to have to give us a lot more information before any one of us can determine if we have knowledge to share. There are tools to macrotize (I'm sure that's a word) input to various types of GUIs, but given my experience with 4gl's in the distant past (waaaaay distant past), and more recent experience with expect and various windows macro tools, the cleanest, most stable, and even possibly quickest way may be to dig into to the 4gl and develop a new screen that does exactly what you need. Hope that helps, cbeckley Update Ah, you already said xterm. My apologies.	[reply]