Back in 2008, I wrote a tip about using SORTA and group fields in RPG to easily sort array data, such as subfile data. Array Data Structures existed back when I wrote the original tip, but SORTA was not supported at that time. So I was forced to use the less-than-obvious group fields technique described in that tip. With new support in RPG 7.1, things have changed, so I’m revisiting the example with an updated look.

The example program that I used before was very simple to retrofit to utilize an actual Array Data Structure. The definition of the array

I need to run a series of similar updates against 12 groups in a very large physical file (millions of records). Is there a way I can combine the updates into one SQL update command? I’d rather have the system read the file once, not 12 times.

–Jim

Here’s an example that illustrates Jim’s update. Set the minimum order quantity to 12 for all items in class A1.

update items
   set minordqty = 12
 where class = 'A1'

If Jim has 12 class values, he has to run 12 update commands. However, if he were to use a CASE structure,

Help. My iSeries shop is being audited. The auditors want a list of all users who have default passwords. They also want us to automatically disable any user profiles that haven’t been active for 60 days. I don’t want to automatically disable my inactive users because I have a lot of profiles that should never be disabled on our system. How do I handle this? I’m on i/OS V5R4M5.

–Brett

Finding your default password users is easy. Simply run the following Analyze Default Password (ANZDFTPWD) command and you’ll get a listing of all system users whose password is equal to