I read with interest your article on the IIF function. I have a function called alignText that I use in just about every program. I use it primarily to center headings, but have found it useful for right adjust as well. I have had this for a long time, so it is in traditional form, not freeform. Notice that there are three optional parameters. The alignment defaults to centering, and then two additional parameters are used to change the display attribute if I want to.

— Gordon Larkins, ASK Senior Technical Consultant

It was nice of Gordie to share his

Suppose a file of summary figures is used for inquiry throughout the day and is repopulated with the latest information on the hour. How do you clear the file, a process which requires an exclusive lock, while the inquiry program is in use? This is the type of problem I have faced several times, and here are a couple of ways I have addressed it.

One method is to place an activity code field in the file, with values of A and D, for example, to indicate active and deleted records. The inquiry program uses a logical file to

OS/400 and i5/OS group profiles are a boon to system administrators because they allow them to centralize object authority administration for several users in one place. But group profiles also have their downside. Improper administration can lead to unnecessary and dangerous authority authorizations, audit control failures, and possible system compromise if an external user can sign on as a group profile member who has all object (*ALLOBJ) authority.

With the goal of making your system more secure through better group profile techniques, here are six simple rules for making group profile administration an easier and safer system process. These rules

Two previous issues of this newsletter have presented ways to put two or more record-selection alternatives into one SQL query. I use these techniques often because they reduce or eliminate the need to clone programs. I recently learned another way to implement alternate record-selection criteria and would like to share it with you today.

Let’s begin with an example table of people.

create table mylib/people
  ( FirstName char(12),
    LastName  char(12),
    Street    char(20),
    City      char(16))

Here’s the data I placed into my copy of the PEOPLE table.

FIRSTNAME LASTNAME    STREET            CITY
========= =========== ================= ============
Smith     Whiteside   451 Elom Street   Lost 

Thank you for a newsletter with information that is always interesting and useful. I enjoyed reading about your IIF function. Here is a function I wrote a few years back on V5R1. It returns a numeric value edited for displaying or printing that includes parenthesis when the value is negative. Our accountants prefer that negative numbers appear within parenthesis. The value returned contains two decimals, as this function is primarily used for monetary amounts.

–Glenn T. Berg, programmer/analyst

It was good of Glenn to share his EditParens function with the rest of us. I don’t blame the bean counters

In last week’s column, I discussed how the default security settings in i5/OS allow *PUBLIC users to automatically modify data and run programs on an i5, iSeries, or AS/400 machine. Left unchanged, these settings can undermine system security and expose sensitive data and programs to unwanted access. This week, I’ll look at some of the cures for this problem and their potential pitfalls.

Recapping the problem, the i5/OS operating system–by default–automatically sets *PUBLIC authority for new libraries and most objects created in them to *CHANGE, according to the following sequence.

1. i5/OS comes shipped with a Create default public authority system