PhysicalDevice—The physical name used to refer to the device. The PhysicalDevice value specifies the device argument for this device’s OPEN command. The name can contain up to 128 alphanumeric characters; it can contain space characters as well. For example, for a printer you could enter the following, where MYNAME is the computer name.

|PRN|\\MYNAME\ISF-HP5SiMX7

Or:

|PRN|\\MYNAME\Canon PIXMA

Type—The type of device. Options: TRM=Terminal. SPL=Spooling device. MT=Magnetic Tape drive. BT=Cartridge tape drive. OTH=Any other device including printers and sequential files. The default depends on the device type.

SubType—Used to refine the definition of your device subtypes. Subtypes specify terminal characteristics. They are used to create the appropriate OPEN command for the device. There should be subtype information for every terminal type.

Prompt—1, 2, or NULL (a blank or empty field) to choose a prompt. Options: 1=Automatically uses this device if it is the current device. 2=Automatically uses this device with predefined Right Margin and Parameter settings. If this field is left blank, the user sees the device selection prompt with the default device defined.

OpenParameter—A colon-separated string that provides the parameters, timeout, and mnespace arguments for this device’s OPEN command. The syntax for the OpenParameter string is:

(parameters):timeout:"mnespace"

Inside the parentheses for parameters, individual items are colon-separated, as follows:

param1:param2:param3

Resulting in:

(param1:param2:param3):timeout:"mnespace"

timeout and mnespace are optional, but if they are provided, the correct number of colons must separate them from previous entries in the OpenParameter string.

parameters must be contained within parentheses only if there is more than one parameter. If there are no parameters, or if there is only one parameter, the parentheses may be omitted from the string. Thus the following is a correct and complete OpenParameter string:

:timeout:"mnespace"

If provided, mnespace must be contained within double quotes, as shown.

For details about the OPEN command and its arguments, including a large variety of syntax examples, see the ObjectScript Reference.

AlternateDevice—The device ID of another device. The value entered for AlternateDevice must be a defined mnemonic such as the Name supplied for another device.

Specifying an AlternateDevice value for the device allows users of the %IS utility to specify “A” to tell InterSystems IRIS to use the alternate device. %IS is a general device selection utility for character-based applications. For details about %IS see the section “Allowing Users to Specify a Device” in the “I/O Devices and Commands” chapter of the I/O Device Guide. The topic of most interest is “%IS Mnemonics,” which describes the conventions for entering the “A” code for %IS.

Description—A text description of where the device is located. This field is for your own reference to help you identify what machine you are configuring.

Alias—An alternate device ID (number) for this device. All aliases must be unique. You can use this value as the device argument in an OPEN command.