FHG Volume: 7 Archives - Page 4 of 14

Weird SQL UNION Results

September 26, 2007 Hey, Ted

I was intrigued by your article Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too. I decided to try your tip with some of my own data. The resulting data set had an anomaly in it. The system omitted a row of input, yet the total was still correct. Why?

–Wyatt

It’s my bad, Wyatt, and I should have known better. (Note to self: Leave instructions for my survivors to put those last five words on my tombstone. It seems to accurately describe my life so far! 😉

The problem was that the example used the word UNION, but it should

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A Snippet Above the Rest

September 26, 2007 Paul Tuohy

You all know that a lot of code consists of similar patterns. In my previous article Be Content with Content Assist, I explained how Content Assist could be used to insert a standard piece of code. This is well and good, but it only applies to free form RPG or COBOL. What about fixed form specs or code that need some alteration?

Although not specifically designed with RPG or COBOL in mind, RSE contains a Snippets view that allows you to define snippets of code that may be amended as you insert them into your program.

The Snippets View

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Admin Alert: What Vendors Want to Know (and How to Get It)

September 26, 2007 Joe Hertvik

When purchasing i5/OS third-party software, vendors may request system control information for the partition their products will be installed in. This information is used to create unique licensing keys that must be installed with the product for piracy prevention. Unfortunately, IBM doesn’t have one screen to find vendor-required system information. To remedy that fault, this week I provide a roadmap for locating common vendor information.

What Vendors Want

It’s my experience that System i software vendors are generally looking for two or more of the following pieces of system control information in order to create a unique product licensing key.

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System i Developers and .NET 2.0: ASP.NET and the Declarative Programming Model

September 19, 2007 Michael Sansoterra

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

IBM’s AS/400 platform (now called the System i) boasts a wonderful history of almost 20 years. Those faithful to the platform well know its strengths and the ingenuity IBM has put into the box, which have allowed it to be successful for so long. That being said, it is no secret that many System i shops maintain legacy applications using old tools. That, in turn, has often left developers out of touch with current developer tools and languages. With so many options, it is difficult to know how

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Don’t Disable Blocking

September 19, 2007 Ted Holt

Do you ever bother to look at warning messages after a successful program compilation? Most warning messages contain no useful information, but the few that do can make a difference. One message that I am always glad to see in RPG compiler listings is RNF7086.

So what is RNF7086? The text reads, “RPG handles blocking for the file. INFDS is updated only when blocks of data are transferred.” This message is a good indicator that the system is going to handle the transfer of data between a database file and the program’s buffers in an efficient manner. As efficiently as

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Admin Alert: When APPN Prevents You from Changing Network Attributes

September 19, 2007 Joe Hertvik

Recently, I was unable to use the i5/OS Change Network Attributes command (CHGNETA) to change i5/OS network attributes on my System i 550. The system wouldn’t take the change and I found that it was because I needed to temporarily vary off my partition’s Advanced Peer-to-Peer Network (APPN) controllers to complete the process. Here’s what happened and what I learned about how APPN can affect network attribute changes.

The Problem

The symptoms for this problem were that after executing the following CHGNETA command, the command would not change the system name on my system.

CHGNETA SYSNAME(NEWNAME) LCLCPNAME(NEWNAME

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Reuse Deleted Records? *YES!

September 12, 2007 Hey, Ted

How does the iSeries find a space to insert a new record over a deleted record when REUSEDLT(*YES) is specified for a file? An associate says that the file is scanned sequentially for a deleted record when writing a new record to the file and as a result there is a significant performance penalty.

–Millard

I sent your question to Kent Milligan of IBM. According to him, “A table scan is not performed. A bitmap-like structure is used to identify available deleted rows within the table.”

So, Millard, there are no performance-related reasons not to reuse deleted records. This topic

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Accessing File Member Timestamps from a .NET C# Program

September 12, 2007 Hey, Mike

I’m trying to use C# .Net to inspect the file create date and file modified date on member files in a custom library under QSys.Lib. Do you have any idea how to do this or can you suggest a place to start? Unfortunately, I code in C# and do not know RPG or CL commands.

–GS

We can tackle this problem without any server side logic. Fortunately, this job is pretty easy, thanks to IBM providing us with integration into the Windows world.

The first thing you need to learn about is a special program called NetServer, which can be

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Admin Alert: A Primer for Changing Your i5/OS Startup Program

September 12, 2007 Joe Hertvik

At some point, all System i and iSeries administrators will need to add new functionality to their system startup program (QSTRUP). While it’s easy to change and recompile QSTRUP, there are a few pitfalls to avoid so that the new code executes properly and so that it doesn’t hang the system in error. To help you understand QSTRUP modification, here’s my primer on locating, changing, and compiling your startup program.

Changing the QSTRUP startup program consists of the following six simple steps.

Finding your startup program object
Finding the startup program’s source code
Archiving your old startup program object and

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PHP: An Easy Yet Powerful Language Syntax

August 29, 2007 Erwin Earley

This is the second in a series of articles on Zend’s PHP for i5/OS. This article presents a discussion of the syntax and features of the PHP language and sets the framework for the third article in the series, which will discuss the API toolkit. I hope you’ll look forward to the third installment, which will delve into the API toolkit that provides the ability for PHP applications to work with i5/OS features and objects. (To read the first installment in this series, go to this link.)

Variables

Variables in the PHP language are signified with a leading dollar

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