Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Programmers and administrators working with the iSeries, especially with its database, need to know lots of OS/400 commands. While this works for long-time RPG programmers and iSeries operation gurus, developers or administrators from different worlds, like Linux or Windows, are faced with a system that feels a bit cumbersome. Surveyor/400 from Linoma Software could be the appropriate solution for them. This client/server product gives a nicely structured GUI for doing common tasks when working on iSeries projects.

Surveyor offers many features that help programmers and administrators handle the iSeries. There are many functions that provide assistance with the DB2 Universal Database for iSeries. This is perhaps the most fascinating part for the developers out there. Accessing the IFS, the iSeries' file system, is another major function, especially when running a server on your system that operates on text files. A spool file manager, for viewing and exporting iSeries spool files, and a Data Area Editor are also available in Surveyor/400 to reduce the need to turn on the 5250 terminal emulation for the iSeries, which is, by the way, also part of the product. Another important fact is that the client of the product can run on any operating system that offers a Java Virtual Machine. You can add as many iSeries systems as you want; they would be displayed in the tree as first-level nodes under AS/400 Network (Figure 1).

Accessing and managing the iSeries DB2 database is a common task for many software project teams using the iSeries. A lot of these projects, at least Java-based ones, are driven by engineers who are not exactly enthusiastic about the green-screen world of OS/400. For them, creating or changing the database tables via DDL, or changing the tables content with UPDDTA, is perhaps not the best solution. In fact, without any guidance from iSeries experts, these techniques may not be possible at all. Remember that the object-oriented-files system of the iSeries is something outsiders won't understand too quickly.

Before we look at how Surveyor structures the DB2 database content, review the following table, which maps iSeries terminology with common SQL terminology, because the screen shots and my personal wording in this article are iSeries flavored.

You can see the different libraries that are in the library list for the current connected user. It is possible to change the library list inside the software to suit your needs. When clicking a library, as done with CEBITLIB, you see the physical files together with all associated logical files. You can examine the tables by clicking Fields or Formats in the tree. Non-iSeries users and developers should remember a physical file is just a database table on the iSeries.

One of the most common tasks for developers is to fill a table with some kind of test data and run applications against this table. Developers were forced to use iSeries tools like UPDDTA, a native application used inside a 5250 terminal session. This tool does not come free on the iSeries and must be purchased with the 5722-WDS licensed program. It is not what developers from other systems expect to use. This is where Surveyor/400 will play its strongest card; it has a very intuitive and elegant table editor.

The table editor comes with a bunch of useful features. You can filter records based on customized queries and supply a custom ordering. The layout of the data display can also be modified in a way that the user selects the fields he wants to see, with a useful function that protects fields against manual changes. The layout can be saved and accessed directly from the tree, as you can see in Figure 1, where a node of the tree has the label Layouts. This provides extremely fast access to a customized table editor. Exporting selected rows, or the complete table, with different output targets is also available, along with some other minor features.

Another feature expected in such a product is an SQL editor. This replaces the native iSeries variant, called STRSQL. For those who are a little bit lazy or don't want to remember each SQL statement, Surveyor provides an SQL Wizard with form-based SQL creation. A Procedure Editor for creating stored procedures completes the picture of the SQL helper tools available. Developers will appreciate this easy and fast access to the iSeries database world.

Accessing the IFS is crucial in any project where the software will be deployed on the iSeries itself. IBM is strongly pushing the WebSphere platform on the iSeries, with its WebSphere Application Server at the heart of the system. If you have ever worked in Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), you will notice that modifying various deployment descriptors, which are, in fact, XML files, is a daily business. Also, Tomcat, the most popular servlet engine available on iSeries, has some descriptor files. So one major concern is how easy it is to edit text-based files on the iSeries. Figure 2 shows the main entry point when working with the IFS.

Copying files to the iSeries can be done by clicking Copy from Workstation in the context menu. You might wonder if you can drag and drop files into Surveyor/400 for more intuitive usage. The answer is no. This is one thing Linoma has to work on. Users have to use a file-chooser dialogue after selecting the highlighted menu item.

Editing files is quite easy. The context menu provides an "Open" item, where you can choose if you want to open via ASCII or EBCDIC. Surveyor provides a file editor that is good enough to handle most of the work. It compares in functionality to Notepad, the well-known Microsoft Windows editor.

There is a lot more that Surveyor/400 has to offer. Most of these features are more interesting to iSeries administrators or operators than programmers working on projects, at least when they are Java-based. Nevertheless, they are important to mention in order to get the big picture of the product.

One really nice feature is the Spoolfile Manager. It replaces the Work with Spooled Files (WRKSPLF) command on the iSeries and adds valuable functionality when printing or exporting the contents of a spool file. You know the pain when your e-mail system is PC-based and a vendor needs the content of a specific spool file via e-mail, in order to check an error of his software on your system. With the Spoolfile Manager, this is no problem. It is accomplished in a matter of seconds.

The Import and Export features of the product are very mature. Physical files can be exported in various formats and also imported based on delimited and fixed-width PC files. You can even map the data to the fields in your physical files.

As frequent releases show, Surveyor/400 is alive and well. In the next couple of releases--Linoma officials say in a timeframe of about three months--we will see more features that will make the 5250 interface obsolete for handling the database. You will be able to right-click a physical file and do things like compile-PF (replaces CRTPF on 5250) or edit-DDL. In the long run, Linoma plans to eliminate the need for STRPDM on 5250.

If you know the iSeries, you might ask if IBM's iSerires Navigator (formerly Operations Navigator) can do the same things equally as well. From a developer's perspective the answer would be yes, but not as well. The database management of iSeries Navigator contains only a fraction of what Surveyor/400 has to offer. The easy modification of table content is not possible, and the overall speed of iSeries Navigator is not as good as Linoma's product. But it's not fair to compare these two products, because they are positioned differently and have only minor overlapping of features.

If you really want to administer the iSeries from a PC client, with full access to the servers and services, iSeries Navigator might be the better choice, but when it comes to work a programmer has to do, Surveyor/400 is a good replacement for the 5722-WDS package for iSeries, which, as I mentioned, is not free. The rights management lets you define what users can do with Surveyor/400, and the file-searching capabilities, with criteria like "not used tables since 30 days," are awesome. When working with the product, I did not find a single bug. The product, which has been under development since 1998, is very stable.

The single-user license for Surveyor/400 on any iSeries processor group is $495. Multi-user licenses start at $995 for a P5 processor group and continue up to $3,495 for a P50 processor group. That's not a lot of money for a tool that will save a lot of time in projects and everyday tasks.

Marc Logemann is founder of Logentis, a German consulting company that focuses on iSeries and Java services and development. Marc is involved in Java- and PHP-based open-source projects and likes reading books about new technologies. E-mail: midrangeserver@logentis.de