FHG Volume: 13 Archives - Page 2 of 7

Make Your DB2 For i Apps Environment Aware

October 23, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

Time and time again, applications need to know something about the environment they’re running on. For example, if an application uses dynamic SQL and it needs to know what features are available, then knowing what version of IBM i it is using can help it decide how to build a query. Likewise, when auditing the source of database changes, it’s useful to know the TCP/IP address of the host requesting the change.

Consider the case where an application may need to know if a certain required PTF has been installed. While there have always been APIs to retrieve this information,

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Responsive Web Design

October 23, 2013 Paul Tuohy

The design of web pages used to be a very straightforward process. You picked a style and made sure that that style was applied throughout your website. Usually, each page would have a fixed width of 500 or 700 pixels, which would be formatted in a grid pattern to best represent the content of the page.

But that was way back when you only had to be concerned about designing a web page that would be displayed on a desktop or a laptop. Today, your web page might be displayed on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile

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Admin Alert: A Primer For Setting Up PC5250 SSL Connectivity, Part 1

October 9, 2013 Joe Hertvik

To better secure your IBM i Access for Windows connections (Access for Windows), you may be required to encrypt your PC5250 Telnet sessions using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. If you need SSL encryption for your PC5250 setups, here’s a primer for setting up your IBM i and PC clients to communicate via SSL certificates.

The Overview

Setting up Telnet SSL connectivity between your PCs and your IBM i partition requires you to perform the following configuration steps in your IBM i Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), your network, and on your PCs running IBM i Access for Windows.

On your

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Anita’s SQL Tips

October 9, 2013 Ted Holt

I derive great satisfaction when something I say benefits someone else. Call me selfish, but I derive as much or more satisfaction when something someone else says benefits me. A case in point occurred when I spoke about SQL recently at the COMMON 2013 Fall Conference and Expo in St. Louis. Anita Corcoran, of StoneMor Partners, in Levittown, Pennsylvania, greatly honored me by coming to hear what I had to say. She shared an SQL tip that I had seen before and forgotten. Today I pass along to you that tip and a few other tips she emailed me.

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Open Access Handles The Queue

October 9, 2013 Jon Paris

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

In my previous tip I introduced you to an RPG Open Access (OA) handler that facilitated writing to a data queue using conventional WRITE operations. As you saw, from the programmer’s perspective they were writing to a disk file. The only difference was that the F-spec included the HANDLER keyword to instruct RPG that the handler was to perform all of the actual I/O operations. This time I am going to describe its companion handler–one that reads from data queues.

Design Considerations

When we write a program that

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CPYFRMIMPF And Fixed Data

September 25, 2013 Ted Holt

It seems that every time I see Copy from Import File (CPYFRMIMPF) mentioned in a Web forum, the question concerns CSV files. CPYFRMIMPF also handles files of fixed-length fields. Such files have certain advantages over CSV files, and there’s more to using them than the IBM documentation tells you.

Don’t get me wrong. CSV files are great. I use them often. But consider that fixed-length data has its advantages. Two that come to mind are:

Fixed-length character fields may contain any character without the nuisance of special treatment. In CSV files, character fields require special handling of the characters used

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Create A Generic Auditing Trigger With SQL

September 25, 2013 Hey, Mike

Note: The document accompanying this article is available for download here.

I am writing a trigger receiver program using RPG with embedded SQL that will go through the before and after record images and create an audit record in an audit file for each field that was changed on an update operation.

I am developing a “shell” trigger program that I’d like to be able to modify slightly, and use the shell as a basis to write these audit records for each file with a trigger on it.

Instead of writing multiple (IF this field changed THEN DO…) for

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Cleaning Up Excessive Job Logs On Your IBM i System

September 25, 2013 Hey, Joe

Thanks for the article on managing IBM i spooled files. We often find it useful to examine user job logs to see exactly where a problem is. But lately, we’ve been getting too many spooled files in QEZJOBLOG. We’re getting 17,000 QZSHSH and QP0ZSPWP job logs each day from website jobs. Any ideas on how to make these useless job logs go away?

–Dale

Preventing A Job Log From Being Generated

My first thought is to see where these jobs are coming from. If you can find the CL program, job scheduler, or submit jobs statement that launches these

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Admin Alert: Six Tips For Managing IBM i Spooled File Storage

September 11, 2013 Joe Hertvik

While recently reviewing system storage on an IBM i partition, we were shocked to discover that spooled files (SPLFs, pronounced spliffs) took up over 10 percent of our usable system storage. Based on that experience and what my shop learned cleaning it up, here are six techniques for keeping your spooled file storage under control.

The Big Six For Spooled File Storage Management

Don’t have FNDBIGSPLF? Get FNDBIGSPLF!!!
Check your IBM i cleanup parameters (GO CLEANUP) to delete old job logs and system generated output
Check for automatically scheduled jobs that are generating unnecessary spooled files
The 2.5 million-page

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Thinking In Pointers

September 11, 2013 Ted Holt

Suppose you were to ask me how large an alphanumeric variable should be, and I replied that I didn’t know, nor did I care. Wouldn’t that sound odd? Those of us who have been programming in business languages such as RPG, COBOL, and CL since the French and Indian War always think it’s important to know the size of a variable, otherwise we won’t be able to define it properly in a program. But when you work with pointers, a variable’s defined size doesn’t necessarily matter. Let me show you what I’m talking about.

Consider a command: