What if I told you that you may have some potential powerful SQL functions on your system that you are not aware of? What if I told you that I have no idea what those SQL functions are named? What if I told you that you could easily use existing RPG routines in SQL queries? Would you be interested?

(Take a tip from the Little Rascals (AKA Our Gang) and say, “And how!”)

It’s easy to make SQL functions out of the subprocedures in service programs. To illustrate, here’s the source code for an RPG module from which a service

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

I would like to share with you one of the techniques I use for paging large lists when using embedded SQL in RPG. This method came about when I needed to write a routine which could be used in both an interactive (green screen) and web environment. There were two main challenges:

• The size of a “page” could vary. This was easy enough to handle, I just had to decide what the maximum page size would be.
• The web interface would not be persistent. This meant that different

Help! My IBM i credit card software stopped talking to our outside credit card processor. One minute it was working, and the next minute it crashed. When I restart the package, it immediately ends. What’s going on? We can’t process our orders.

–Henry

This is an unusual situation I’ve seen every once in a while, and it usually involves your TCP/IP setup.

Troubleshooting The Issue

The first thing to look at is whether all your TCP/IP interfaces are up and running, and whether anything changed with your TCP/IP setup. Before you call your software provider or IBM, check the