What You Should Know About Activation Groups

February 11, 2004 Joel Cochran

In the last several articles we began dipping our toes into the ILE waters by learning about service programs, binder source, and binding directories. You should now have a firm grasp of these building blocks and be ready to start constructing an ILE application. But before plowing ahead, we need to examine the most frustrating and least understood aspect of ILE: activation groups.

WHAT IS AN ACTIVATION GROUP?

I like to think of an activation group as a container for memory and other resources. According to the ILE Concepts manual (PDF format), this container is considered a “substructure of

Soft-Coded Report Distribution

February 11, 2004 Bruce Guetzkow

[The code for this article is available for download.]

Printer files let programmers separate one type of output from program processing. When a printer file is created, several attributes can be specified (like output queue, copies) to simplify report routing instructions. But over time things change. You may, for instance, need to send reports to a different output queue or change the number of copies. The typical response is to update the affected printer files, provided you have the authority. This article presents an alternative: soft-coded report distribution.

Soft-coded report distribution lets you change printer file attributes

Dealing with Divided Date Fields

February 11, 2004 Hey, Ted

Some of our ancient database files have separate fields for year, month, and day parts of a date. Combining separate fields to form single date fields is manageable but messy. Building logical files to combine the fields is not always practical, although we have done some of that. When digging around on Google one day, I accidentally discovered an SQL function that is well-suited for divided date fields.

The function I discovered is called DateSerial. It is a part of various software products, including Microsoft Access and various versions of Visual Basic. It requires three arguments: year, month, and day.

The Better Way to Delete Physical Files

February 11, 2004 Hey, Ted

You missed a possible link between two articles in the January 14 issue! The first article is “Why SQL, Why Now,” and the second is “Deleting with a Generic File Name.”

The missing link is that, if you use SQL (to define your database) and issue the command DROP TABLE, the indexes and logical files are deleted (dropped) also! So that’s one of the many reasons why you should use SQL.

–Wim

Thanks for the advice, Wim. Several other readers wrote with similar comments.

SQL’s DROP TABLE command will indeed drop a physical file and the logical files that

OS/400 Alert: SSL Certificates

February 11, 2004 Shannon O'Donnell

If your shop is one of the thousands using digital certificates to enable secure transactions between your iSeries and users’ browsers, you may have recently experienced a problem with disabled certificate authorities. If not, chances are you will soon. Read on for more details. Also included in this issue is a list of a few of IBM’s recommended fixes for OS/400 licensed programs.

VERISIGN EXPIRES CERTIFICATE AUTHORITIES

On January 7, Verisign, a major worldwide provider of digital certificates, experienced a sudden surge in demand for verification of its clients’ certificate authorities. This check is performed by connecting to Verisign’s