Like many business environments today, my shop consists of just one person wearing many hats to support the IBM i system. This makes for a tight, controlled environment with that one person managing the system very efficiently. However, most auditors aren’t too pleased with this setup as it opens the door for potential violations with established compliance guidelines. Even though we are a small shop with minimal budget, we were able to easily develop a solution to satisfy the auditors. Here’s what we did.

Most environments like ours are run by individuals with high integrity and dedication to their jobs

The system we love so well has a long love affair with the EBCDIC collating sequence, but most of the world runs on ASCII and Unicode. Dealing with ASCII data has not been a trivial experience for RPG programmers, but IBM i 7.2 adds a feature that helps immensely.

In ancient days, RPG programmers would call the QDCXLATE API, which uses a translation table, to convert EBCDIC to ASCII. This is probably not a good solution. IBM’s translation tables were good for their time, but times have changed.

A modern solution is the iconv family of code conversion APIs, which

Before I proceed with this latest installment on the features of the iSphere toolset that plugs into RDi, I want to first update a few items I’ve covered in earlier tips in this series.

First of all, in my first iSphere tip, I neglected to give credit to one of the primary contributors to the iSphere toolset. I had mentioned the team at TaskForce IT, but failed to acknowledge the significant work done by Thomas Raddatz of Tools400. My apologies to Thomas for that omission.

Second, thanks to continued development efforts, a new version of the iSphere plug-in is