DDS screen design: is it possible for user to key leading '-' minus sign to store value as negative number?

OS400 screen handling seems to ignore a leading minus sign keyed into a DDS screen field.

This seems odd to most users, who commonly key -123 to indicate negative 123.

Unfortunately OS400 strips off the leading negative sign and only passes +123 to the program driving the screen.


Is there a simple method of ensuring that the OS400 screen handler passes a leading minus sign back to the calling pgm?

OS7.1

DDS:

A QTY 15S 2B 6 50EDTCDE(N)


It is apparent that OS400 will capture a trailing minus sign, and will also capture the negative value when using the minus "field exit" key. However these are not intuitive methods, and are a throwback to the 1970's. Is it possible to capture -123 as -123 using DDS numeric fields?

(Hopefully there is a better method than using an alpha screen field and scraping it, scanning for a minus sign).


Thanks in advance!!