In my last tip on RSE shortcuts, I talked about shortcuts that help you find your way as you navigate through source members. Eventually, you find the place where you need to work with the code. So in this tip, I’ll concentrate on shortcuts to help with that, and specifically working with blocks of code.

First let’s talk about selecting a block of code. There are many ways: You could drag your mouse over the block or hold down the Shift key and use the cursor arrow down key to select the lines for the block. The one I’ve

As you well know, a common task in business computing is to update an entity (customer, vendor, purchase order line, etc.) that exists, but add the entity if it doesn’t exist. In RPG this requires two operations–an update and a write–within a conditional statement. In SQL one statement handles the whole shebang. Here’s how it works.

Here’s some RPG III code that illustrates the situation.

FCUSTF   UF  E           K        DISK
 . . .  code omitted
C           CUSKEY    KLIST
C                     KFLD           COMP
C                     KFLD           ACCT
C*
 . . .  more code omitted
C*                                              HILOEQ
C           CUSKEY    CHAINCUSTREC              99
C*
 . . 

In Testing The Ruby Waters I introduced you to Ruby and how to use irb (interactive Ruby shell) to easily run and test Ruby code. In this article I expound on that and introduce more features of the Ruby programming language as it relates to an IBM i programmer. In particular, Ruby methods and one form of encapsulation.

Ruby is an object-oriented language; everything in Ruby is an object. But that doesn’t inhibit Ruby from being used in a more procedural approach. Below is a Ruby program named “say_hi.rb” with a method definition of “hi”, and then the invocation of