The RPG compiler team is one fine bunch of practical people. From my perspective, everything they do seems to be motivated by the desire to help programmers do their jobs more easily, rather than by some theoretical, esoteric computer science concepts that have no practical value. (I will admit that I still haven’t quite forgiven them for not supporting MOVE, MOVEL, and MOVEA in free-format calculations, but I’m working on it.) Anyway, RPG V5R4 includes more practical stuff, which, thanks to Barbara Morris, I have the pleasure of sharing with you.

Free Format Enhancements

If you’re a free-format enthusiast, as

I liked your article, Numbering Rows in an SQL Result Set, but I think your INCR function may be overkill. I’m able to accomplish the same thing with the RRN function. Would you please elaborate on the difference between the two methods?

–Rafael

Rafael, you need to take a look at the results of the slightly modified SQL query you sent me. Here’s the query.

SELECT INCR(9999), (RRN(qcustcdt) + 9999),
       LSTNAM, INIT, CUSNUM               
  FROM qiws/qcustcdt                      
 ORDER BY LSTNAM, INIT                    

And here are the results.

INCR    RRN     LSTNAM    INIT  CUSNUM
10000   10011   Abraham   M T   583990
10001   10006   Alison    J S   

For i5, iSeries, and AS/400 administrators, it’s common to move libraries between partitions or machines. Library duplication is necessary when you’re creating or updating data in a test partition, moving software libraries between machines, or migrating information from an existing partition to a new machine in advance of an upgrade. Whatever your migration situation, there are definite steps for easily transferring libraries between environments.

When performing library duplication, you generally need to perform the following five steps for a successful transfer.

1. Prepping the data to be moved
2. Saving the library to be moved
3. Transferring the saved library to the new