Suppose your boss tasks you with grabbing and processing some XML from an HTTP request to create a new customer order. If you have a “deer in the headlights” expression on your face, don’t fear, you don’t have to punt this request over the cubicle wall to the web developers. Without weeks or months of training, you can build a PHP script to retrieve the XML data that RPG can parse.

What is PHP?

PHP is a full-featured scripting language that runs on a web server. Just type your PHP code in a text editor (even Notepad), save it on

In spite of my great admiration for the IBM i operating system, I have to admit it has its idiosyncrasies. One of them, which has been there since Day 1, is the way the Submit Job (SBMJOB) command reformats decimal parameters of the CALL command. Fortunately, a relatively recent addition to CL provides an easy way to deal with this quirk.

Assume a CL program calls an RPG program, passing along two decimal variables and a character variable.

dcl  &Option       *char    1
dcl  &Account      *dec     5
dcl  &ThruDate     *dec     7

call AR100R (&Account &ThruDate &Option)

One day you are told

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

I am working on an RPG program that does some very basic pre-processing of an XML document before passing it along to another program for final processing. Even though my program works, it fills up the job log with error messages. Can you help me get rid of them?

The XML is structured like this.

 <Message>
  <Payload>
   <Event>. . . </Event>
  </Payload>
 </Message>

The <Payload> element can contain a child element of <Event>, <Report>, or <Parameter>. Only one of these elements is ever contained in the message at