Do you want this function to always be available no matter which display file is in use? Or are you asking about how to make it work for specific display files and programs?

…and secret functional key will allow a popup screen to come up.

Secret? From whom? If it’s secret from users, then it must be for some specific ‘special’ users. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to have it be functional under a user who wasn’t supposed to know that it existed. It could only be used if the ‘special’ user pressed the key in a normal user’s session. When that happened, the secret would be out.

So that kind of implies that it only needs to be functional under a ‘special’ user’s session.

And for that, all you have to do is condition the key based on user.

Or is there more info that might help clarify what you need?

Tom

Your program could conceivably always pass control to a service program which carries out some standard interrogation of the passed information to see if it should initiate a window.

Frankly, performance would be better f you just abstract this functionality to a called program.

Display panel
Receive control
if key pressed, call popup,
else get on with stuff

The pop up function is just a stand alone program – much as the concept of a service program.

At some level, you have to link the key press to the desired action. Once you’ve done that, how you deal with it is a matter of taste, standards, and performance.

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The Attention program could use any desired logic such as testing the job user to determine if it should run or not. If it determines that it shouldn’t run, it could call the user’s normal Attention program.

Tom