Don’t Let Overrides Deceive You
June 2, 2004 Cletus the Codeslinger
[The code for this article is available for download.]
Overrides have some nice advantages. Without overrides, I would have to clone programs in order to use different files of the same format. Overrides also let me use different members of a multi-member file. Sometimes it’s helpful to know which file or member was used to produce a certain report or display. OS/400 includes an easy-to-use API that eliminates the confusion.
The API I’m referring to is Retrieve File Override Information (QDMRTVFO). Maybe the best way to introduce it is to show the prototype member I /COPY into programs that call QDMRTVFO.
D QDMRTVFO PR EXTPGM('QDMRTVFO')
D Outfo 48a
D OutfoLen 10i 0 CONST
D FormatName 8a CONST
D FileName 10a CONST
D ErrorDS 16a
D OutfoErrorDS DS 16 QUALIFIED
D BytesProv 10i 0 inz(16)
D BytesAvail 10i 0
D ExceptionID 7
D OutfoDS DS 48 QUALIFIED
D BytesReturn 10i 0
D BytesAvail 10i 0
D FileName 10a
D LibName 10a
D MemberName 10a
D OvrType 10a
QDMRTVFO takes five parameters:
- A 48-byte data structure into which the API will load the override information. In this copy member, this data structure has the name OutfoDS.
- A 4-byte integer containing the length of the data structure. This seems unnecessary, but is provided to allow you to pass a shorter data structure, if you wish.
- An 8-byte format name. The only supported value to date is OVRL0100.
- The name of the file being overridden.
- The usual error data structure used with APIs. In this copy member, the error data structure is OutfoErrorDS.
Here’s a short RPG program that illustrates how to use QDMRTVFO. This program reads and lists the PDM options file, QAUOOPT.
The API is called in the RtvOverride subroutine. If there is an override over QAUOOPT, the subfields of the OutfoDS data structure will have values. If there is no override, the subfields will come back blank.
–Cletus the Codeslinger
Ted Holt responds: This reminds me of a similar technique that can be used with native I/O operations. There are three subfields in the file information data structure that return the name of the database file member that is being used and the name of the library that contains them.
FSomeFile if e disk infds(SomeDS) D SomeDS ds D File 83 92 D Lib 93 102 D Mbr 129 138
But that technique doesn’t work with SQL, as yours does.
