I enjoyed the V5R4 RPG and CL enhancements articles. I can’t wait to use subroutines to clean up code in CL programs. Also, the RPG and SQL tips and techniques are great. But those of us who labor in the COBOL fields could use a little help.

–Thom

It’s taken me some time to get to it, Thom, but thanks to Philip Mawby, of IBM‘s Toronto software labs, I have the information you need. I’ll hit the high points. Consult the V5R4 COBOL reference for more details.

XML Support

In V5R4, COBOL stays ahead of RPG in the area

I am using SQL to load a subfile. Since there are 16 subfile records to a page, I fetch 16 database records into a data structure. However, the fetch does not always return 16 rows. Sometimes it returns fewer. How can I tell how many data structure occurrences were fetched?

–Lynn

You will need to check the SQLER3 field of the SQL Communications Area (SQLCA). I wrote about this field earlier in Four Hundred Guru. See “How Many Records Did SQL Delete?”

Here’s an example I threw together that you can start from. It fetches seven records at a

I’m a little confused as to what happens when you set a user ID’s Password parameter (PASSWORD) to *NONE. I’m not sure whether it determines if a password is or is not required for that user to log on to the system. A little explanation here would be helpful.

–Mukesh

Setting a user’s password to *NONE is a relatively simple concept, but it has a few confusing aspects. Here’s how it works.

You can set the User Password parameter to *NONE when you create the user profile or when you run the following Change User Profile command (CHGUSRPRF):

CHGUSRPRF USRPRF(