The information about the forward and reverse orientation can be deduced using the bitwise flags. See this: http://picard.sourceforge.net/explain-flags.html.

Regarding strand, do you have any special tags in your BAM file that were generated by SOLiD aligner ?

Do you have single end reads or paired end reads? What you expect when having strand-specific data for paired-end reads is that first read of the pair will align to either + or - strand for certain exon - please check my answer here: A: Should RNA-seq reads map to one strand of cDNA reference?

One of the solutions is to convert sam to bam and then filter based on flags explained here: http://picard.sourceforge.net/explain-flags.html

samtools view -f flag aln.bam (include reads with certain flag) samtools view -F flag aln.bam (exclude reads with certain flag)

Please specify what reads you have and what is your reference.