When I read your statement that CL cannot write to printer files, I immediately thought, “It can’t? Then what have I been doing for the last couple of decades?” I looked through the article and saw that it didn’t mention my most used method, and I wondered how it was missed.

–Tom Liotta

Tom takes advantage of one of the best features of ILE, namely the ability to bind routines written in different languages to form one program. The non-CL procedure that he included is the printf function, which is well-known to C programmers. Even though printf produces stream

Sending Escape Messages from RPG is a great article. Your program defines the message data parameter as 80 bytes of character data, but the IBM Knowledge Center defines MSGDTA as char(*) with notes saying it can be up to 32,767 bytes. I would like a variable longer than 80 bytes, but instead of coding 100 today, 120 next project, and so on, how could I code it to take full advantage of the API?

–Glenn

You’re right that the API can handle up to 32K of data, but you need only define MsgDta as large as you need it to

Running CL commands and submitting batch jobs are great ways to use existing program functionality from a .Net desktop, web, or web service application. In this article we’ll focus on the XMLSERVICE remote command functionality. You’ll see just how easy it is to use XMLSERVICE to run programs or submit batch jobs on your IBM i systems.

In this installment we’ll begin to tour the XMLSERVICEi .Net application code and samples, starting with the remote command call example. If you haven’t installed and set up the XMLSERVICE application code and created an Apache web server instance yet, please check out