• Admin Alert: What To Do with Vendor Profiles During an Audit, PLUS Two Other Great Features

  November 2, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  System auditors generally don’t like i OS vendor-supplied profiles. You know, those user profiles that vendors require for software installation, ownership, or running special jobs. Some vendors even require you to give these profiles security officer (*SECOFR) or security administrator (*SECADM) authority. This can create audit points because auditors generally don’t like excessive security officer-enabled profiles on the system. Here are two strategies for handling this situation. What Is a Vendor-Supplied User Profile? A vendor-supplied user profile is any profile that exists on your i OS system in order to load software objects, or run vendor programs. It may also

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• 10 Facts You Should Know about Special Values

  October 26, 2011 Ted Holt

  Imagine not being allowed to code *FIRST in the MBR parameter of the Override with Database File (OVRDBF) command. Horrible thought, isn’t it? Special values make commands more sensible and easy to use. Here are 10 facts every IBM i developer should know in order to effectively use special values in his own commands. 1. Special values are character strings that are incompatible with validity checking rules. In this example, BATCH requires a three-digit number, and *ALL does not fit that description. PARM KWD(BATCH) + TYPE(*DEC) LEN(3 0) + DFT(*ALL) + REL(*GT 0) + SPCVAL((*ALL -1)) + PROMPT('Batch number')</all> 2.

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• VALUES: A Truly Useless DDS Keyword

  October 26, 2011 Hey, Ted

  We had a recent crisis in our shop. When we dug to the root of the problem, we found that one of our files had an invalid value in one of the fields. I don’t understand why this was the case, because the programmer who wrote the DDS used the VALUES keyword on the field in question. Does the VALUES keyword not prevent invalid data from entering the database? –Paul No, Paul. One would think it does, but use of the VALUES keyword only applies to the workstation controller. That is, only the green-screen interface is restricted by the VALUES

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• Limiting How Much Memory a Storage Pool Can Allocate

  October 26, 2011 Hey, Joe

  I want to run the i OS Performance Adjuster to automatically allocate system memory to my subsystems. But when I turn it on, most of the memory goes to the *INTERACT storage pool used by the QINTER subsystem. I want to take care of interactive users, but I also want some memory left over for other subsystems. How do I limit *INTERACT from using too much memory? –Jens This sometimes happens with using the i operating system automatic performance adjustment feature. By default in the i 6.1 operating system, the Performance Adjustment (QPFRADJ) system value is set to “2”. This

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• Return a User Profile Listing to a .NET Client

  October 19, 2011 Hey, Mike

  I am a VB.NET programmer and am looking to retrieve a list of all users and their expiration dates on our AS/400 system. I stumbled across the cwbx library and have been able to connect to our system, but not much else from there. Can you suggest how this info can be retrieved from VB.NET? Thanks. –Elliot Hi, Elliot: The easiest way to retrieve this user info is to use the i/OS Display User Profile (DSPUSRPRF) command and dump the results to a table (also known as an outfile): DSPUSRPRF USRPRF(*ALL) OUTPUT(*OUTFILE) OUTFILE(QTEMP/LSTUSRPRFP) The above command (assuming you have the

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• Dealing with Faulty Logic

  October 19, 2011 Ted Holt

  Supposedly computer programming is a logical science. One would think, then, that computer programmers would be logical thinkers. It is not so. Let me provide a few examples of illogical thinking taken from real production programs. Then I will show a simple, low-tech way to deal with logical expressions so that they don’t end up illogical. Let’s start with this example taken from fixed-format RPG specs. I suggest you find the bad logic yourself before reading my comments. TYPE IFNE 'A' TYPE IFEQ 'S' XCODE CABNE 'S' CONTIN ENDIF TYPE IFEQ *BLANK XCODE CABEQ 'S' CONTIN ENDIF ENDIF This code

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• Admin Alert: Adding Redundancy to Power i SMS Monitoring

  October 19, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  In an earlier column, I discussed how to use email addressing to send text message alerts to Power i administrators when a problem occurs. This week, I’ll discuss how to enhance that solution by providing redundancy for i OS text messaging, so that urgent messages can always be delivered regardless of whether or not your email system is running. The Coverage Plan, Phase I In my previous article, I outlined a monitoring plan for using cell phones, email, and text messages to alert administrators when critical iSeries, System i, and Power i events occur. This plan consisted of

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• Add Outfile Support to Your Applications

  October 12, 2011 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. When I compare IBM i to other operating systems, I am amazed. This well-designed, well-built operating system has numerous features that are foreign concepts to other operating systems. One of those features is that of “outfiles”, files that are built by display-type and work-type commands. If you haven’t done so, consider that it may be advantageous to write your own commands with outfile support. In general, programs that write to database files always write to certain database files, and that’s as it should be. A file maintenance program

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• Skipping Robot/SCHEDULE Runs on AS/400-Class Machines

  October 12, 2011 Hey, Joe

  On our System i 550, we use Robot/SCHEDULE for batch processing. Every so often, we have a programming issue where we have to skip running a job in the middle of a long job stream. The skipped job sometimes has reactive jobs hanging off it. We still want to run the reactive jobs, even when we don’t run their prerequisite job. Got any ideas? –Keith Like many other shops, we also use Robot/SCHEDULE for running batch job streams on our System i and Power i machines. Like you, we’ve encountered the same issue where we want to skip running one

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• Call Again and Again and Again…

  October 5, 2011 Paul Tuohy

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. In programming terms, recursion is the process whereby a function may call itself. Traditionally, this is something we are not used to in RPG. Programs and subroutines cannot call themselves. Or if you did somehow manage it (and you could), you would get unpredictable results. But the introduction of subprocedures opened up the possibility of using recursion because subprocedures can call themselves. It is usually very difficult to come up with practical examples of using recursion, and most of those examples are usually very specific to an application.

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