• SQL Functions You Didn’t Know You Had, Part 1

  October 22, 2014 Ted Holt

  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

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• Paging Cursors

  October 22, 2014 Paul Tuohy

  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

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• Admin Alert: A Skeleton Utility Program For Controlling IBM i Job Queues

  October 8, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  From an IBM i operations viewpoint, there are several scenarios where you need to automate job queue management. Situations where you may have to automatically change one or more parameters for a job waiting in job queue include: Looking for a specific job and automatically moving it to another job queue. Moving all jobs in queue to a different job queue when they are held up behind a slow-moving job or a job waiting for a reply in batch. Rearranging or changing job priorities so certain jobs run before or after other jobs. Detecting an excessive number of jobs in

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• A Bevy Of BIFs: Updates

  October 8, 2014 Jon Paris

  In my last tip I returned to the “Bevy” series to tell you about the latest addition to the family: %ScanRpl. Shortly after completing that tip I realized that there have been a number of more recent BIFs such as %SubArr and some enhancements to existing BIFs like %Trimx that seem to have escaped people’s notice. In this tip I attempt to fill those omissions. %Trim: Specify Characters to Trim Let’s start with a BIF that hopefully you are all familiar with: %Trim. Before going any further I should point out that when I say %Trim, I am referring to

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• Find A View Of A View Of A View. . .

  October 8, 2014 Paul Tuohy

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. SQL’s Data Definition Language (DDL) offers many great features, one of which is the ability to define a view of a view. This can lead to simple or complex structures making use of views of views of views of. . . you get the idea. But one of the difficulties with this technique is that, once created, it is difficult to determine the depth of dependencies for views. The Display Database Relations (DSPDBR) command will tell you which views are immediately dependent on a view but it will

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• Admin Alert: What’s The Danger Zone For IBM i Disk Utilization?

  September 24, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  Working on IBM i and its predecessor machines for 30 years, I sometimes have to modify or redo advice that I’ve relied on for years. Case in point: how full does your disk space have to be before you put your IBM i partition in danger? I had an experience this month that made me question my assumptions on when you should worry about and how you should set your disk utilization thresholds. Here’s what happened. What Went Before In the past, I’ve recommended setting your disk utilization thresholds so that the IBM OS issues this system operator message when

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• A Bevy Of BIFs: %ScanRpl (Scan And Replace)

  September 24, 2014 Jon Paris

  This gem of a BIF was introduced with the V7.1 release and so was not available some five years ago when I wrote my original Bevy series of tips. Now that more people have V7.1 in their shops, I decided it was time to revisit the series and add it to the collection. It is probably my all-time favorite BIF . . . at least so far. Simply put, %ScanRpl will search a target string for a given character sequence and replace it with another. Not only that but it will then continue to search through the target string and

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• Testing The Ruby Waters

  September 24, 2014 Aaron Bartell

  As of October 2013 Ruby is supported on IBM i via PowerRuby. This is good news as Ruby has become a very popular programming language for producing web applications because of its simplicity, flexibility, and vast community. In this article we will be introducing you to tools that aid in learning Ruby on IBM i. Often times the easiest way to learn a programming language is by starting small and playing with it. Ruby makes this very easy to do with its included Interactive Ruby Shell, or irb for short. The irb environment is also called REPL (Read,

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• Share And Share Alike With RSE

  September 17, 2014 Susan Gantner

  In my last tip, Decisions, Decisions: Templates Or Snippets?, I discussed taking advantage of both Templates and Snippets. They are used to make life simpler when including small pieces of code that might otherwise be copied from another source member somewhere or, worse yet, rewritten from scratch over and over again. Once you’ve created a few templates and/or snippets, your fellow developers may ask you to share the wealth. So how do you do that? There are Import and Export options for both Snippets and Templates. They work a bit differently, however. Remember that Templates are created via the

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• Bash Is Not A Shell Game

  September 17, 2014 Aaron Bartell

  It is interesting to observe where the IBM i side of IBM invests its resources. The operating system and database get a whole lot of investment, but the native application layer seemingly not nearly as much. Why? Because I don’t believe they see a viable future for modern applications being written in timely fashion with the likes of RPG. If that is true then what future does the platform have? The PASE environment on IBM i is the remaining hope for the operating system to live in the realm of modernity. Why? Because that’s where modern things are being ported

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