Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Converting Dates

November 30, 2005 Bruce Guetzkow

The code for this article is available for download.

Although the date data type field has been around for several years now, many of us still have dates stored in our database as numeric or alpha fields. We’ve all used various ways to convert those dates to other formats so they are more human-readable or to comply with client or vendor needs: data structures, move left and move right, the infamous multiplication with truncation trick. While we may not use the date data type in the database, we can still use the date data type to simplify converting dates.

Editing Numbers in CL, Take Two

November 30, 2005 Hey, Ted

I just read Cletus’ tip on the editing of numbers in CL procedures, called Editing Numbers in CL. I will add these techniques to my tool kit. As always, thanks for the great stuff. Here’s another method I’ve used to remove leading blanks from numbers in CL.

–Russ

Russ’s method uses a message description that has a four-byte binary variable. Here’s how it works. (This following code is mine, not his, so any mistakes are also mine.)

Let’s use the example from the previous article. Variable &CustOrders contains the number of orders that have been added to a database file.

Selectively Deleting OS/400 Spool Files

November 30, 2005 Hey, Joe

My users insist on saving labels and printouts after they are printed. And the worst part is that I can’t just clear the output queues containing these spooled files because the company is asking me to keep the most recent spooled files for 30 days. Do you have any idea how I can selectively delete spooled files in an output queue that are more than 30 days old while leaving more recent printouts intact?

–Simon

While i5/OS and OS/400 provide options for automatically deleting system joblogs and other system output after a set number of days, there is no option