This is our third article in the PHP in i5/OS series. In previous articles we have provided an overview of PHP on System i as well as the basic syntax of the language. This article provides an overview of the API toolkit, and a collection of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that facilitate PHP programs accessing and working with i5/OS objects.

Web Development and Deployment Stacks–LAMP

To begin our discussion let’s first look at the Web development and deployment stack that incorporation of PHP provides to i5/OS. In the past you have probably encountered the LAMP stack – a Web development/deployment

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

One common integration problem encountered by those building client/server or Web-based interfaces to a legacy green-screen application is mapping a free form text field into a fixed width field. This tip presents a code segment I wrote to solve this problem.

For example, say you have the following DDS defined legacy table called ORDCOMT that is designed to store the comments for a customer order:

In the legacy application, a customer service

In certain scenarios, you may want to limit certain users from starting more than one i5/OS session at a time. While the System i provides a method for limiting all users from starting multiple sessions, it’s not widely understood how to limit individual users from starting multiple sessions. This week, I’ll examine how to limit individual i5/OS user sign-ons and I’ll show you how to use it to your advantage.

The Art of Limiting Multiple Sign-ons

The Limit device sessions system value (QLMTDEVSSN) will generally control whether your users can start more than one user session at a

It happened. We had our system about a year and we had a power crash over the weekend. Yes, we have a UPS, but that does not mean that when the system was starved for power it did not come crashing down, and things got worse after that. When we got the UPS, the boss decided that we would get the version that kept the system up for eight minutes instead of getting the extra battery for 37 minutes. We set the delay timer (QUPSDLYTIM) at two minutes. How is it that we crashed so hard?

From this

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

Everybody likes to export DB2 data to an Excel spreadsheet. It’s quick and easy, and there are plenty of ways to do it. On the other hand, I’m often asked by people, including fellow developers, to assist them with importing an Excel worksheet into a DB2 table. In fact, what developer hasn’t had the experience of a bean counter asking for assistance in uploading a spreadsheet into an ERP system?

Importing native Excel worksheets has always had some measure of difficulty. There are headings to worry about, date

Last week, I began demonstrating a technique to allow a remote 5250 session to attach to and run an i5/OS system console located on a Hardware Management Console (HMC). In part 1, I provided details on configuring the HMC to accept remote 5250 sessions. This week, I’ll examine the PC side and look at configuring an iSeries Access for Windows session to access the system console on the HMC.

Ready for Connection

As mentioned last week, configuring an HMC to allow remote access to an i5 partition’s system console is a relatively simple affair. It consists of the following