• Guru: Avoiding Land Mines During A Role Swap

  March 3, 2025 Steven McIver

  Having a disaster recovery plan is crucial for many businesses running on IBM i. The data that resides on these systems is often mission critical to the business. Implementing a strategy for disaster recovery is tough. Planning and actually executing on the strategy is even tougher.

  Even with excellent planning, role swap tests to a designated disaster recovery machine can many times fall short due to unforeseen circumstances that force an immediate role swap back to the production site. In this article, I’ve compiled a few of those land mines to look out for to help ensure a successful swap …

  Read more

• Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With GitHub Copilot

  February 17, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  If you have been meaning to give VS Code a try, but just haven’t had a chance, I encourage you to avail yourself today. Yes, for you RDi users, it will take a little bit to migrate your favorite settings, code snippets, and compile commands – but I promise, you won’t regret the move.

  In my article, Getting Started With The Code 4 i Extension Within VS Code, I offer a few more insights to help get you started. And if you are an SEU user, yes, the switch may seem daunting, but one of the great things about …

  Read more

• Guru: Creating An RPG Stored Procedure With Parameters

  January 20, 2025 Mike Larsen

  There are times we need to build processes that will be used across different platforms. An example is a pricing routine. When a system needs to get pricing, we need to make sure the price the customer pays is the same regardless of how the order was created in our system.

  One way to create this functionality is using web services. Another way we can provide this functionality is through stored procedures. This series of tips will focus on different ways we can build stored procedures on IBM i.

  For the first part, I created an RPG program (Figure 1) …

  Read more

• Guru: RPG Receives Enumerator Operator

  November 11, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  The RPG language now (some would argue, finally) has an enumerator operator. This was introduced in IBM i 7.5 TR3 and IBM i 7.4 TR9.

  DISCLAIMER: The edibility of the mushrooms listed in my test program are purely to give the program some context and make it interesting. Their edible status is based on information from the Missouri Department of Conservation’s publication A Guide to Missouri’s Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms. Before foraging for or consuming any wild mushroom do your research and be safe.

  Let’s dive right into a code sample. We’ll start with a simple linear-main program …

  Read more

• Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 4

  October 21, 2024 Chris Ringer

  The final article in this series is about the JWT (JSON Web Token). If you wish to review the previous articles, you can drill back from part three. For unattended machine to machine (M2M) processes, a JWT string is a formatted container for requesting access to a resource server. I think of a resource server as the applications. And in our case, the JWT has an asymmetric signature.

  But really, what is a JWT? It’s similar to a temporary driver’s license. Think about your last visit to a hotel (figure 1).

  Steps:

  1. You present your ID (JWT) during check-in

  …

  Read more

• Guru: RPG Select Operation Gets Some Sweet Upgrades

  September 23, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  I have always been a fan of RPG’s Select operation. Any time I’m coding an If statement and think there’s a chance that there could be a third situation other than the If-Else conditions, I will go ahead and code the Select operation instead of the If statement. The RPG language’s Select operation got a pretty sweet upgrade in V7R5 TR2 and V7R4 TR8. Now, the Select statement can be presented with a value and we have two new op-codes to use within the Select operation; When-is and When-in.

  DISCLAIMER: The edibility of the mushrooms listed in my test …

  Read more

• Guru: Creating A Web Service With Basic Authentication

  August 12, 2024 Mike Larsen

  I have been working with web services for many years, and I usually use IBM’s IWS (Integrated Web Service) tool to create them. The tool provides a wizard-based interface that allows me to quickly create a web service from an RPG program. Recently, I created a web service that uses basic authentication, and I want to share my experience.

  I am assuming that you are already familiar with creating a web server and a web service, so I am just going to show the steps that need to be taken to add basic authentication functionality. If you would like me …

  Read more

• Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 3

  July 22, 2024 Chris Ringer

  Greetings everyone. Articles part one and two were both an introduction on how to build components in an HTTP request. In part three, we will begin to connect the dots and discuss how to asymmetrically sign a simple string. If you ever need to send a secure HTTP request to a government agency or financial institution, you likely will authenticate with a signed token. So, here we go!

  Base64 Take Two

  In part one, the SQL scalar function BASE64_ENCODE embedded in RPG converted a string to base64. This technique will cover most use cases, but what if you need …

  Read more

• Guru: Parsing JSON That Has Spaces In The Key

  July 8, 2024 Mike Larsen

  One of my favorite tasks is working with APIs. I’ve worked with many APIs over the years, and some introduce unique challenges that must be overcome. Recently, I worked on a project where I was to consume a REST API that provided a JSON payload. While that seems straight forward, I quickly discovered a challenge.

  The JSON payload had keys that have spaces in them (Figure 1). That may be considered bad practice, but I still needed to figure out how I could parse it correctly. Having never seen JSON like this before, I started with a Google search. I …

  Read more

• Guru: Growing A More Productive Team With Procedure Driven RPG

  June 24, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  There are many great benefits to procedure driven RPG, and I have covered many of them in my previous articles. In this article, I want to share with you what I believe is the biggest benefit to implementing procedure driven RPG in your shop; procedures, when written and implemented properly, are reusable.

  When you’ve written a new procedure that expertly tackles one task, you should be proud of the accomplishment. But don’t keep that in your program. Export it in a service program for your whole team to use! Now, undoubtedly, you will find yourself at one point thinking: “Yeah, …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles