FHG Archives - Page 18 of 144

Testing The Ruby Waters

September 24, 2014 Aaron Bartell

As of October 2013 Ruby is supported on IBM i via PowerRuby. This is good news as Ruby has become a very popular programming language for producing web applications because of its simplicity, flexibility, and vast community. In this article we will be introducing you to tools that aid in learning Ruby on IBM i.

Often times the easiest way to learn a programming language is by starting small and playing with it. Ruby makes this very easy to do with its included Interactive Ruby Shell, or irb for short.

The irb environment is also called REPL (Read,

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A Bevy Of BIFs: %ScanRpl (Scan And Replace)

September 24, 2014 Jon Paris

This gem of a BIF was introduced with the V7.1 release and so was not available some five years ago when I wrote my original Bevy series of tips. Now that more people have V7.1 in their shops, I decided it was time to revisit the series and add it to the collection. It is probably my all-time favorite BIF . . . at least so far.

Simply put, %ScanRpl will search a target string for a given character sequence and replace it with another. Not only that but it will then continue to search through the target string and

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Admin Alert: What’s The Danger Zone For IBM i Disk Utilization?

September 24, 2014 Joe Hertvik

Working on IBM i and its predecessor machines for 30 years, I sometimes have to modify or redo advice that I’ve relied on for years. Case in point: how full does your disk space have to be before you put your IBM i partition in danger?

I had an experience this month that made me question my assumptions on when you should worry about and how you should set your disk utilization thresholds. Here’s what happened.

What Went Before

In the past, I’ve recommended setting your disk utilization thresholds so that the IBM OS issues this system operator message when

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Bash Is Not A Shell Game

September 17, 2014 Aaron Bartell

It is interesting to observe where the IBM i side of IBM invests its resources. The operating system and database get a whole lot of investment, but the native application layer seemingly not nearly as much.

Why? Because I don’t believe they see a viable future for modern applications being written in timely fashion with the likes of RPG. If that is true then what future does the platform have? The PASE environment on IBM i is the remaining hope for the operating system to live in the realm of modernity. Why? Because that’s where modern things are being ported

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Share And Share Alike With RSE

September 17, 2014 Susan Gantner

In my last tip, Decisions, Decisions: Templates Or Snippets?, I discussed taking advantage of both Templates and Snippets. They are used to make life simpler when including small pieces of code that might otherwise be copied from another source member somewhere or, worse yet, rewritten from scratch over and over again.

Once you’ve created a few templates and/or snippets, your fellow developers may ask you to share the wealth. So how do you do that? There are Import and Export options for both Snippets and Templates. They work a bit differently, however.

Remember that Templates are created via the

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Restoring Passwords & Private Authorities When Using RSTUSRPRF

September 17, 2014 Hey, Joe

Restoring Passwords & Private Authorities When Using RSTUSRPRF

Thanks for your nice article on copying user profiles between IBM i systems. I wanted to add that I copied a profile between systems and got this system message.

CPC3713 - &2 &1 restored without password or group linkage

I fixed it by adding the Security Data parameter to the Restore User Profile (RSTUSRPRF) command. I’m running IBM i 6.1.

–Avraham

Here’s what happened with Avraham’s system and how it affects user profile restores.

When moving user profiles between systems, IBM has two scenarios for restoring passwords and private authorities for

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The Nearly Forgotten DSPLY Operation

September 10, 2014 Paul Tuohy

I am sometimes asked strange questions at conferences. A recent example is: “Which operation code do you use most in RPG?” After overcoming my initial reaction of wondering what the questioner was smoking (and where I could get some), I gave the question some thought. And the answer is: The DSPLY operation.

Now, before you start to wonder what I am smoking (and where you can get some), let me explain. Firstly, the DSPLY operation will never see its way into production code, I only use it in test programs (more in a minute). Secondly, and what a lot of

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DB2 for i 7.2 Features and Fun: Part 3

September 10, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

In the second tip of this series, I explored three new features introduced in DB2 for i 7.2: KEEP IN MEMORY clause; AUTONOMOUS PROCEDURE; and the CHECK CONSTRAINT VIOLATION clause. This tip aims to keep the momentum going by exploring a handful of remaining miscellaneous features, in no particular order.

TABLE_NAME And TABLE_SCHEMA Scalar Functions

These two new functions exist in the SYSIBM schema and are used to lookup base information about an alias. Say an alias is defined on a DB2 remote system table on a system named WASHINGTON:

CREATE ALIAS DATALIB.WASHINGTON_TRANSACTIONS FOR
WASHINGTON.ADVWORKS.TRANSACTIONHISTORY;

The following VALUES statement will

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Admin Alert: Importing IBM i Spooled Files Into Excel

September 10, 2014 Joe Hertvik

For a recent audit, I had to export IBM i spooled file data into Excel spreadsheets to send to our auditors. If you have a similar need for spooled file to Excel conversion, here’s my drill for importing spool file data into an Excel 2010 spreadsheet.

One Goal, Two Paths

You can export spooled file data to an Excel file in two ways: by using a commercial product or by using System i Navigator and the Text Import Wizard from Microsoft Excel 2010.

If you have a third-party product that exports spooled files to Excel format, then by all means

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Creating A GUID In DB2 For i

August 27, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

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

Normally, modesty would forbid me from saying this, but I love Four Hundred Guru. I was looking for a way to create a globally unique identifier (GUID) also known as a universally unique identifier (UUID) so that I could write some DB2 code compatible with SQL Server. Unfortunately DB2 doesn’t have a GUID/UUID function so I had to search the web to find an alternative. What did I stumble upon? A good ol’ FHG article showing how to create a GUID/UUID in RPG that could easily be

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