Put Users On the Fast Track

September 13, 2002 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hey, Ted:

We are a very user-oriented shop, that is, users do virtually everything on their own. Since the days when we ran a System/34, users have been menu oriented, but they also understood the command line.

In the S/34 and S/36 days, users ran OCL procedures. Unlike CL programs, which are initiated with the CALL command, OCL procedures are run by simply typing the procedures’ names. Users learned the names of frequently used procedures and became accustomed to running procedures from the command line rather than from menus.

When the AS/400 came along, users wanted to continue to use fast-path names to run their programs from a command line. Typing CALL AR2004C was not friendly enough for them. They wanted to type DAILYSALES instead.

We solved this problem by creating commands to run programs. However, that created another problem. We were creating a lot of one-line source members. Here’s how we solved that problem.

First, create the following two-line source member called @DFTCMDSRC in QGPL/QCMDSRC:

/* Default command source */
CMD

Next, use the following syntax whenever you want to create a command that does nothing more that call the command-processing program:

CRTCMD CMD(lib/cmd_name) +
   PGM(lib/pgm_name) +
   SRCFILE(QGPL/QCMDSRC) +
   SRCMBR(@DFTCMDSRC)
   ..other keywords as needed..

— Chris

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