USERDATA

You use the USERDATA program to create a USERDATA.SYS file. Some reasons you might want to run this program are:

• You want to change your keying convention. Running USERDATA is the only way to change the keying convention setting. For more information on the keying convention see Keyboard Interface in the DP4 Quick Reference
• You will be running DP4 using a dumb terminal or terminal emulator such as Telnet

• You want to create a suitable userdata.sys file for a Windows CE device.

Here are some notes on using this program.

• If you are going to replace your current userdata.sys, make sure you keep a backup of the file in case you need to go back to it.

• USERDATA usually keeps most output related settings, such as output display formats and colours. If you would prefer to revert to the default setttings (which may be a good idea if the userdata.sys file is for a screen with very different capabilities from the one you are using), specify the -reset command tail.

• On the other hand, USERDATA, does not (by default) keep the keyboard translation table. You can use the -samekey option to keep your current keyboard translation table. However this may sometime give unexpected results (for example if the old and new terminals are for completely different dumb terminals)

• A userdata.sys file created for a PC Windows operating system will not work well on most Windows CE devices. To create a suitable userdata.sys file for a CE device, run userdata on a Windows PC, but specify the -pspc command tail. Copy the created userdata.sys to the CE device.

• Running userdata always resets the default security levels to 0, so if you want a userdata.sys file with a higher access level remember to use the User Preferences option of dfsetup afterwards.

• If you want to create a userdata.sys file for a terminal, and it is not shown in the list of available terminal types, and you are unable or unwilling to make your terminal emulate one of the supported terminal types, then you will need to create a custom userdata.sys file using the Terminal Characteristics option of DFSETUP.

• For a complete list of command line options see USERDATA in the DP4 Quick Reference.
  For information on creating a USERDATA.SYS for Windows see Creating USERDATA.SYS in the DP4 for Windows Installation Guide.
  

• If you want to customise your userdata.sys file further then use the following table to find the appropriate information on what to do next.

  Customisation	Program
  Modify the Default User Preferences	Use the User Preferences option of DFSETUP as described in Changing the Default User Preferences
  Keyboard Customisation (for example configuring keys on specialised keyboards to act as function keys,or keys on regular keyboards to emulate keys on such keyboards)	Use the Keyboard Customisation option of DFSETUP
  Create a userdata.sys file for an unsupported terminal	Use the Terminal Characteristics option of DFSETUP
  Modify the lower case to upper case translate table	Use the COLLATE program as described in the DP4 Developer's Manual.