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

In System i Developers and .NET 2.0: ASP.NET and the Declarative Programming Model, which is Part 1 of this series, I did a jet tour of the basics of .NET 2.0 and tried to present compelling reasons why System i programmers might want to learn it. Among the listed reasons to learn .NET are popularity (with a large supporting community), versatility and the ability to integrate with the AS/400 and System i world. Part 1 also presented a step-by-step scenario on how to create a basic ASP.NET

In ON vs. WHERE, I demonstrated that an outer join yields different results depending on whether you place a selection expression in the ON clause or the WHERE clause for a secondary file. Now I want to follow up on that tip by looking at the difference between the ON and WHERE clauses for a primary table.

Here’s the invoicing data I used in the previous tip. We have header information:

SELECT H.* FROM INVHDR AS H

Invoice  Company   Customer      Date
47566      1           44     2004-05-03
47567      2            5     2004-05-03
47568      1        10001     2004-05-03
47569      7          777     2004-05-03
47570      7          

Like it or not, iSeries, i5, and System i administrators usually have to write small Control Language (CL) programs to help them manage their systems. To make this task easier, I frequently use several common programming and IBM-sponsored techniques to perform different functions. This week, I’ll look at three basic programming and administrative tools for CL programming and demonstrate how they can benefit you when creating operational programs.

Tool #1: Sending Status Messages When a User is Running a Program

When you’re writing long-running code that has to be run interactively, it helps to flash status messages at the bottom