The code accompanying this article is available for download

One of my former bosses would often greet me with the phrase, “We have an opportunity.” I suppose he didn’t like the word problem. A recent problem I faced turned out to be a great opportunity. The utility I developed has turned out to be handy, and I thought you might like to have it in your toolbox.

It all started when a CL program that I had written blew up because the value of a variable was in mixed case (i.e., “Print”) instead of uppercase (“PRINT”). An IF command

The code accompanying this article is available for download

This tip has one very easy point: There’s lot of reusable SQL code out there, and System i (AS/400) DB2 developers can take advantage of it. Even though SQL’s promise of cross platform independence has never materialized, there are still enough similarities to make conversion between platforms worthwhile. All it takes is a little practice.

This tip assumes you have some knowledge of writing SQL modules (triggers, functions or stored procedures in the SQL language). If you’re new to this arena, review the Control State section in the IBM SQL Reference

In a recent column, I discussed how to use the i5/OS Send Break Message command (SNDBRKMSG) to send messages that will immediately display on all 5250 terminals. Unfortunately, SNDBRKMSG has some issues in that it sends break messages to all defined user terminal message queues, not just the terminals of currently signed on users. In this issue, I’ll discuss my utility to send break messages only to signed-on users.

The Problem with SNDBRKMSG (and SNDMSG, Too)

In my target scenario, I want to send a message to all my signed on interactive 5250 users asking them to perform some