Midrange Guru--Get with the Times

It's true that there are many ways to skin a cat, but some are more modern than others. I would like to share a more modern way to view spool files than the ones that were mentioned in Midrange Guru.

If you use the GUI version of WRKSPLF provided with Client Access, and the AFP spool file viewer it uses, you can see not only underlined fields but also blank lines, highlights (bold), overlays, and pagination, and get a full-page view of your output. It's much better than using a green screen, and it looks like a printed page (black on white, not green on black). It opens a separate window for viewing spool files, which you can keep open all day and refresh with F5. You can also open more than one spool file and size the window for side-by-side comparisons of output. Check out the menus, especially Options/Include. . . , where you can select spool files by attributes like user and output queue.

To use the GUI WRKSPLF, run the following commands from a command line or a CL program:

The first command starts the PC Organizer, which is necessary to run PC commands from the AS/400. This needs to be done only once per session. The second command runs the GUI WRKSPLF command on the PC. Replace the following with your system's name:

I've been using this GUI version of WRKSPLF for two years now and wouldn't look at the green-screen version at all, except for one problem: I've never been able to get the search function to work consistently. It works sometimes, but if the file is large, it doesn't seem to find strings after the first page. (If anyone knows what I'm doing wrong, please let me know!) But for reading the output, it beats green screen, hands down. Add this to your users' menus, and you will probably earn some brownie points.

Thanks for the tip, John. I agree with everything you say. However, I try to make Guru practical and useful, and the fact is, a lot of people don't have Operations Navigator and other new stuff. Suppose a guy gets a call at home at 10:30 p.m. The folks at the office are trying to get the month closed, and two reports don't jibe with each another. He has some emulation software at home, but no printer support. Maybe he didn't have room on the hard drive and is just using Telnet. Maybe the tip saves him a trip to the office. The tip we published was written with that sort of situation in mind.

But you are right that more modern methods are better, and I appreciate your sharing this information with your fellow Midrange Guru readers. Thanks to your making it so easy, I suspect a lot of readers will put this tip to work quickly.