• A Ruby And RPG Conversation

  March 17, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  “Due diligence” and “risk assessment” are phrases that should be running through your head anytime technology decisions are being made where new tooling or ideas are being put into production. The same is true when considering whether the Ruby language has a place in your shop. After all, it is a significant change in direction when introducing a new language to your technology stack. What many people don’t know is the adoption of Ruby (and the Rails web framework) can be done in incremental fashion if that is what works best for you. What I mean by that is not

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• SQL Joins With Tree Structures: An Oracular Point Of View

  March 17, 2015 Ted Holt

  Tree structures are a part of life, especially in the world of manufacturing, where I make my living, so we may as well learn to deal with them. Today I return to this topic, featuring another tool that you can use to tackle the traversal of trees. In IBM 7.1, IBM added support for a tree-traversal syntax that Oracle invented ages ago. This syntax centers on two clauses of the select statement: START WITH and CONNECT BY. I’ll illustrate with a few simple queries. First, we need a tree structure to play with. Here are some simple bills of materials.

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• Death To Decimal Data Errors!

  March 17, 2015 Jon Paris

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. We have all encountered decimal data errors at some time or another. The biggest difficulty they present is that, by the time they have been detected, no recovery is possible. Or to be more precise, no practical recovery is possible. In my previous tip, I mentioned that one of the benefits of data structure I/O is that you can avoid decimal data errors. In this tip I’m going to show you how and why that works. The code package associated with this tip contains three test programs

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• Case-Insensitive Searching Of Spooled Files

  March 3, 2015 Ted Holt

  We rely heavily on the DSPSPLF (Display Spooled File) command. We use it all day long, you and I, usually by selecting option 5 from various work-with displays. And yet this workhorse on which we depend suffers from a glaring deficiency–searching for text is case-sensitive. We expect case sensitivity from primitive operating systems like Unixsaurus, but not from the powerful IBM i. Here are a few ways to locate text in spooled files regardless of case. First is the modern–and in my opinion, the best–way: IBM Navigator for i, the browser application that replaces System i Navigator. This app runs

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• Old Stuff, New Ways: Avoiding Record Locks

  March 3, 2015 Jon Paris

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Recently I was teaching a group of RPGers the joys of qualified data structures. I happened to mention how much simpler some of the new DS capabilities had made the techniques I use to avoid problems caused by record locks. It turned out that more than half of the audience had never heard of the technique. I guess that we all have a tendency to think that the techniques and tools that we use are common knowledge amongst other programmers. As an educator I should perhaps be less

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• Git To GitHub

  March 3, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  In my last article, the git tooling was introduced as a mechanism to track changes made to source code. This article expounds on that by showing how to make your local IFS git repository (“repo” for short) publicly available to others. I say “publicly” because that is the purpose of this article, though it could just as easily be applied to a situation where you wanted a private repo for a specific set of users (i.e., co-workers and/or consultants). For the purposes of this article we will be walking through setting up a GitHub.com public repo. Note, GitHub has

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• Git To It

  February 10, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. In my last article we learned about Ruby methods and encapsulation. During the various exercises there were many code changes made and we didn’t really have a simple way to keep track of how the code changed from one version to the next. That’s where source change management (SCM) tools like git come into play and is what we will be diving into today. The git Website says: “Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large

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• Row Value Expressions Simplify Complex Row Selection

  February 10, 2015 Ted Holt

  If you like mile-long, messy, obfuscated, hard-to-read SQL, the kind that makes sane people want to cuss and spit on everybody and everything, then this tip is not for you. And please don’t apply for a job in my shop. But if you have better things to do than debug SQL, then I have a simple but clever technique for you. Suppose the chief bean counter walks into your office and asks for a spreadsheet of general ledger transactions. He wants the current-month transactions for accounts 120, 135, 180, 192, and 198. Here’s how a novice would write the query

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• Create Excel Spreadsheets From DB2 Data With PHPExcel

  February 10, 2015 Bruce Guetzkow

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. It is amazing that so many users manually key from a report into a spreadsheet for further analysis. PHPExcel is a tool that you can use to write directly to a spreadsheet for them. Here are the steps that you need to take to install and create a simple spreadsheet from DB2 data using PHPExcel. Getting Started The following are requirements to use PHPExcel on Power Systems on IBM i: Zend Server must be installed and running PHPExcel must be downloaded and installed For the purposes of this

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• Knee-Deep In Ruby Waters

  January 27, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  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

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