• Another Way to Pass Parms to SBMJOB

  October 5, 2011 Bruce Guetzkow

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. A couple of years ago I needed to develop a process where a group of items could be selected from a screen and a report listing those items could be generated. On the surface, a simple task. Of course, if you give a mouse a cookie, they’re going to want a glass of milk, or another report. . . and another. Again, not too complicated. All that should be needed is a way to submit a call to a variable list of programs. As long as each program

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• Admin Alert: How to Retrieve Password Parameters for Auditors

  October 5, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  Your organization’s fiscal year may have ended on September 30. Meaning you could soon be visited by auditors looking for information on how your organization operates its AS/400-class machine (iSeries, System i, Power i). Your auditors will be particularly interested in your password configuration parameters and whether they meet standards. To that end, here’s a quick drill for retrieving password setup values at audit time. What Auditors Want Auditors generally require you to provide the following sets of password related parameters. Your password configuration parameters–The rules users follow for creating passwords. Configuration and program code for Password Validation Program

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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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• Another Way to Pass Parms to SBMJOB

  October 5, 2011 Bruce Guetzkow

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. A couple of years ago I needed to develop a process where a group of items could be selected from a screen and a report listing those items could be generated. On the surface, a simple task. Of course, if you give a mouse a cookie, they’re going to want a glass of milk, or another report. . . and another. Again, not too complicated. All that should be needed is a way to submit a call to a variable list of programs. As long as each program

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  Read more

• Admin Alert: How to Retrieve Password Parameters for Auditors

  October 5, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  Your organization’s fiscal year may have ended on September 30. Meaning you could soon be visited by auditors looking for information on how your organization operates its AS/400-class machine (iSeries, System i, Power i). Your auditors will be particularly interested in your password configuration parameters and whether they meet standards. To that end, here’s a quick drill for retrieving password setup values at audit time. What Auditors Want Auditors generally require you to provide the following sets of password related parameters. Your password configuration parameters–The rules users follow for creating passwords. Configuration and program code for Password Validation Program

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  Read more

• Data Needed to Debug Authority Failures, Part 2

  September 28, 2011 Patrick Botz

  In the first article in this series, I introduced the concept of debugging authority failures and described how the operating system determines whether an executing job should be allowed to access an object. Armed with this information, the topic of this second article, data needed to debug authority failures, will make much more sense. In my third article, I will describe how and where to find this information. Data needed for debugging authority failures can be classified into the following categories: Who, What, When, Which, and Why. Some of this information helps you find other pieces of data. All of

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• A Better Way To Read a Job Log

  September 28, 2011 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. A job log is a wonderful thing to have when you’re trying to figure out why a good program went bad. The problem with job logs is that the few messages that point out what went wrong are entombed within myriad irrelevant messages. And job logs can be long. Just recently I dealt with one that was over 400 pages. I wrote a utility to help me make sense of job logs. Maybe it will help you, too. My utility, which I call Convert Job Log (CVTJOBLOG), reads

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• Checking Cache Battery Status Without STRSST

  September 28, 2011 Hey, Joe

  Concerning your article about debunking cache battery rumors, did you know that there’s another way to see cache battery information without going into System Service Tools (STRSST)? IBM is offering a new program called QSMBTTCC that allows you to display cache battery status from the command line. It’s enabled by PTFs. –Steve As a refresher, IBM uses batteries in its disk controllers to provide caching for its disk drives. The batteries have a useful life of about 2.75 to 3 years and the system will start sending warning messages to change your batteries when your controller cache batteries are

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• Call-backs Simplify File IO

  September 21, 2011 Bruce Guetzkow

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Writing subfile programs to display a list of data elements is a task most IBM i programmers have done countless times. It can be tedious and extremely repetitive, especially if you are listing information from the same file in multiple programs. Since the logic is nearly identical in all of those programs, wouldn’t it be great if we could put some or all of it into a service program that could be used in many places? The part of the process that is common to all of those

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• A Better Way to Display Quick 5250 Messages in RPG

  September 21, 2011 Hey, Mike

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Here are a couple of code snippets containing a call to the QUILNGTX API that does a much better job than the DSPLY opcode. This API has been around for a long time (before/free), and we wrapped it into a service program procedure to make it easier to use. As you can see from the included code sample, it only takes a character work variable to contain the text to display, and a call to the ShowText subprocedure to display a message. It shows a pop-up box

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