• Guru: RPG Sorting and Searching, A 7.2 Update

  September 5, 2018 Susan Gantner

  Author’s Note: This is the second update I’ve done to a tip I originally wrote back in 2008. In 2010, I updated the code to use SORTA with array data structures. Here in 2018 I’m updating it once more — this time to use free-form declarations in place of the D specs, including a more obvious way to code the nested data structure used in some of the examples and references to more recent tips for handling very large arrays. The 2010 version was entitled “. . . A 7.1 Update.” I’ve renamed this one as “. . . A …

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• Guru: An Introduction to Processing XML With RPG, Part 3

  September 5, 2018 Jon Paris

  Author’s Note: In part 1 and part 2 of this XML series, I introduced you to the basics of using RPG’s XML support. In this tip we begin to explore some of the challenges that you may face when processing commercial XML documents, and the support XML-INTO offers to handle them. In particular we will be reviewing how to ignore parts of the document through the use of the path= %XML option. We will also review how to handle XML documents that make use of namespaces and how to handle XML element names that include characters that are not valid …

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• Guru: Handling Constraint Violations In RPG

  September 5, 2018 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: The contents of this article were originally published as two separate articles – Handling Constraint Violations in RPG and Handling Constraints Revisited. The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since 2009.

  Constraints have been around for a long time but apparently have not quite made it into every programmer’s tool kit. This is partly explained by the fact that implementing constraints in an existing application can be tricky, but it doesn’t explain why constraints are not used extensively in new …

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• Guru: Three Little Words That Simplify Debugging

  August 29, 2018 Susan Gantner

  Author’s Note: The original version of this tip first appeared in March 2007. That was three renames ago for the toolset we now know as RDi. (It was WDSC then). Although RDi has seen many significant enhancements in the intervening years, not much about starting a debug session has changed. But the number of RPGers now using RDi for editing their code has grown dramatically, and many recent converts still struggle with getting a debug session started. So I think this tip bears repeating — with some name changes, updated images and relevant functional updates here and there.

  I had …

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• Guru: An Introduction to Processing XML With RPG, Part 2

  August 29, 2018 Jon Paris

  In the first part of this series for Guru Classic, I introduced you to the basics of using RPG’s XML-INTO op-code. In that tip I showed how the provision of a count provided by RPG in the PSDS can be used to determine how many of a repeating element were processed.

  However, as I noted at the time, this can only be used when handling a repeating outer element. But what if there is a repeating element within each of those outer elements? In this second part of the series we will be studying how to handle those situations. …

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• Guru: Getting the Message, Part 2

  August 29, 2018 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2009. Since then, I have worked on many modernization projects with many clients and, in every one of those projects, we have used some form of the contents of this (and the following) article. The content of the article has been updated for free-form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since 2009. The original articles also showed examples of direct calls to RPG subprocedures from PHP. Given that we now have many languages (Node.js, Python etc.) that interact with RPG, I changed the mechanism …

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• HelpSystems Nabs MPG for Performance Management

  August 27, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Midrange Performance Group, the Boulder, Colorado-based provider of capacity and performance management software for IBM i, is the latest software vendor to call it quits and join up with HelpSystems. It was HelpSystems first acquisition of the year and 20th since 2006.

  For decades, Midrange Performance Group, (MPG) has been one of the most trusted names when it comes to capacity planning and performance management for IBM i and the midrange servers that preceded it. If you want to know how your workload would run on a new Power Systems server from IBM, then you could find out using …

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• In Memory Of Dan Burger

  August 27, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When in heaven do you start, when it has been two decades of sharing work and life together, as comrades in arms, as confidants, as companions in the heroic sense of that word?

  You can start by saying that without Dan Burger, there never would have been an IT Jungle.

  After an unexpected, brief, and intense illness, Dan passed away on August 19, to the great shock to all of us here at IT Jungle and to the people who knew Dan and know that he is gone. Dan was part of many communities, and the IBM i community was …

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• Guru: Refactoring RPG – GOTO

  August 27, 2018 Ted Holt

  When I first learned COBOL, I coded loops the way all the programmers in my shop did — with GO TO. Paragraph names were labels, not routines. Then I took a class in COBOL and learned structured programming. I’ve never looked back. I wish other people felt the same way, because I don’t like to work on GOTO-laden programs.

  Injudicious use of branching — in RPG that would be the GOTO and CABxx op codes — is a major reason I refactor. GOTO plays havoc with program “logic”, a word I hesitate to use in this context. The minute someone …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Boiling Points

  August 27, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  A three-minute egg cooks consistently most anywhere near sea level; boiling that egg will take longer up in the Himalayas. Water, like just about every other pure liquid, has at any particular atmospheric pressure a consistent boiling point. At sea level, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius; it can get no hotter. Similarly, IBM apparently cannot grow beyond $100 billion in annual revenue. Lately, its business vaporizes at a somewhat lower point, about $80 billion, like water on Mount Everest. Whenever the company adds revenue here it manages to lose it there.

  The boiling point of water is a …

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