• Bind By Slash-Copy

  May 15, 2013 Ted Holt

  I advise, recommend, urge, admonish, and even cajole RPG programmers to quit using subroutines and start using subprocedures instead. Yet I still hear from people who work in shops that allow the use of RPG IV (a.k.a. ILE RPG), but do not allow binding to modules and service programs. Today I offer two ways to use subprocedures that do not require ILE binding. But first, let’s have a quick review of ILE binding of subprocedures into programs. 1. Bind by copy The object code of the subprocedures of a module is copied into the object code of a program

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• Search SQL Source Using System Catalogs

  May 15, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  The green screen PDM and the GUI Rational Developer for i (RDi) tools provide developers an easy way to search through source code to find a specified text literal. But what if these tools don’t have access to all your code, in particular the SQL code? Many developers may not be keeping an up-to-date source copy of their SQL persisted stored modules (functions, procedures and triggers) and further, may not be keeping a copy of the source at all. If this is the case in your shop, never fear, for DB2 for i maintains a record of the source statements

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• Odds and Ends

  May 1, 2013 Ted Holt

  It’s been awhile since we had an issue of odds and ends. Today seems like a good day for it. I hope you find something of benefit here. Hey, Ted: I tried to use the sed command in a CL program to replace [ with [n (newline). I tried many ways to get it to work. I finally gave up and used tr to translate from [ to n. I was really hoping to keep the bracket. When running Qshell commands in a CL procedure, how can you force a continuation line for a sed command? How can you insert

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• Copy Source Members Between Systems Without FTP

  May 1, 2013 Bob Cozzi

  Moving source code between systems is critical in a multi-system environment. Using save/restore is one way to accomplish this task, but not everyone has save/restore authority. Using FTP is another popular way to move one or more source members between systems, but the downside is that the SRCSEQ and SRCDAT fields are thrown out. Only the SRCDTA field is sent, similar to sending a plain ASCII text file. Maybe I’m late to the party, but I found a better way. The better way is one of those things that causes me to think that I must be the last person

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• Admin Alert: Six Things To Do Before Switching Production Processing To Your CBU

  May 1, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  Switching production processing to an IBM i Capacity BackUp (CBU) system involves more than just running the High Availability (HA) software commands that initiate the switch. It also involves preparing your source and target machines to switch places, so that data is correctly replicated and you can confidently run production processing on your CBU. Today, I’ll describe six steps you can take to ensure a smooth CBU switch over. Setting The Stage This article lists out tasks you should consider adding to your HA run book to produce the best results when switching production processing to an IBM i CBU

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• How Do I Load This Digital Certificate On My IBM i Machine?

  April 17, 2013 Hey, Joe

  A banking client is requiring us to load a Verisign Class Secure Server CA – G3 certificate authority (CA) certificate on my IBM i box. But when I try to load it into Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), DCM gives me this error: “An error occurred during certificate validation. The issuer of the certificate may not be in the certificate store or the issuer may not be enabled.” What’s going on? –WC This is a fairly common problem and it has an easy solution. The certificate won’t load because in addition to loading the bank’s Verisign Class Secure Server CA –

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• Extract Zoned And Packed-Decimal Values From Character Fields, Take Two

  April 17, 2013 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Sometimes a reader of this august publication asks me about a problem that I don’t face, and I reply with an academic answer. But when I face the same problem, my interest ceases to be academic, and I look for a more practical solution. Such is the case with the use of SQL to extract packed- and zoned-decimal fields from a string of character data. In the January 19, 2005, issue of Four Hundred Guru, I answered a question from Mary, who wanted to create a logical

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• Encoding XML (Or HTML) From Within RPG

  April 17, 2013 Bob Cozzi

  RPG developers who jump to the web and CGI programming soon learn that a stream-based syntax requires the use of certain control characters. Unlike native database, which uses structures and hidden attributes to control field size and starting and ending locations, HTML and XML rely on <i>tags</i>, agreed-upon syntax for start and end delimiters. You may be familiar with Comma Separated Values and the use of both the comma and the double-quote as the delimiters for that type of file. XML and HTML use much more verbose values as their tags or delimiters. Tags do double duty; they separate data

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• Admin Alert: A Checklist For Monitoring Your IBM i Environment

  April 3, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  IBM i administration has elements of old-time system operations and real-time monitoring. You need to ensure that everything is working correctly and that problems aren’t silently developing that can: a) interfere with customer processing; and b) violate customer service-level agreement (SLA) requirements or create audit violations. This week, let’s flesh out a checklist of items to help IBM i admins achieve these goals. The Essential Piece In order to catch trouble before it occurs, I highly recommend that you set up an IBM i monitoring system to catch developing situations and alert you via email or text when a problem

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• Updating Through A Join With SQL, Take Three

  April 3, 2013 Ted Holt

  As I was looking for something in the DB2 for i SQL reference, my eyes happened to see MERGE in the list of statements, and I realized that I had been doing something the hard way. I realized that I was about to abandon the method I had been using to update values in one database table (physical file) from data in another one. Once in a while, someone requests that I use a list of values, which are usually stored in a spreadsheet, to mass update the database on the big computer. Fortunately, several years ago I learned how

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