• Guru Classic: Overlaid Packed Data In Data Structures

  March 4, 2020 Jon Paris

  When I re-read this tip while looking for a “Classic” candidate, I was reminded that the underlying issue it addresses, namely how data is actually stored in an RPG program, is one that many RPG programmers don’t really have a firm grip on. That alone made it a good candidate. But perhaps even more important is demonstrating this topic to the many new programmers coming onto the platform. Unlike those of us who started off with assembly languages, C, RPG, or COBOL, modern programmers trained in C#, Python, or PHP have never had any need to understand the mechanics of …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs — Updates

  February 5, 2020 Jon Paris

  In my previous tip I returned to the “Bevy” series to tell you about the latest addition to the family: %ScanRpl. Shortly after completing that tip I realized that there have been a number of more recent BIFs such as %SubArr and some enhancements to existing BIFs like %Trimx that seem to have escaped people’s notice. In this tip I attempt to fill those omissions.

  %Trim: Specify Characters to Trim

  Let’s start with a BIF that hopefully you are all familiar with: %Trim. Before going any further I should point out that when I say %Trim, I am referring to …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs – %ScanRpl (Scan And Replace)

  January 8, 2020 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 most active development shops are running V7.1 and later it seems a good candidate for a “Classic” to remind readers of its capabilities. The intervening years have not dimmed its utility and it remains one of my all-time favorite BIFs.

  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 …

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• PTC Completes Database Support In Implementer

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As a change management tool, PTC’s Implementer is well-regarded among IBM i users for its ability to track development tasks and smooth out the promotion process. While the product has mostly been used to track source code in programming languages like RPG and Java, customers have increasingly been putting business logic into Db2 for i. With the recent launch of Implementer 12.3, PTC has wrapped up planned enhancements for the database.

  PTC‘s Implementer provides a full range of capabilities for managing development processes for IBM i shops. The software works closely with IBM‘s Rational Developer for i (RDi) …

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• Guru Classic: The Efficiency of Varying Length Character Variables

  August 14, 2019 Jon Paris

  Remember the bad old days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the only way to build strings in RPG involved playing silly games with arrays? Or worse still, obscure combinations of MOVE operations? Thankfully those days are far behind us — although sadly there are still a few RPG/400 dinosaurs coding away!

  RPG IV introduced many powerful new string handling options, such as the %TRIMx family of BIFs, but even now there are capabilities in the language that few programmers fully exploit. One of my favorites is variable length fields. This lack of familiarity made this tip an obvious …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy of BIFs, %XLATE and %REPLACE

  March 6, 2019 Jon Paris

  Author’s Note: I’m revisiting this classic tip since the original was written back in 2009, long before the introduction of free-form data declarations. In addition, I’ve updated this tip to point to the new %SCANRPL BIF, which impacts this scenario. And, of course, I still regularly encounter RPGers who are confused by the differences between the %XLATE and %REPLACE built-in functions (BIFs). Part of that confusion of course is the result of wishful thinking on the part of those frustrated by the limitations of %XLATE!

  The first thing to remember when deciding which function to use is that %XLATE operates …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy of BIFs — %CHAR, %EDITC and %EDITW

  February 13, 2019 Jon Paris

  Author’s Note: The reason I chose this particular tip to revisit was that a similar question came up on one of the RPG web forums the other day. The questioner was looking for an easy way to edit a numeric field to include the use of colons as separators. Because the answer involves the use of %EditW I have added a simple example of its use at the end of this tip.

  “I need to convert a numeric value into a character string. How do I . . . ?” This question is often asked by RPGers as they face …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy of BIFs – %SCAN and %CHECK

  January 16, 2019 Jon Paris

  Many RPG programmers seem to get confused about the usage and operation of a number of built-in functions (BIFs). In particular the BIFs %XLATE, %REPLACE, %SCAN, and %CHECK seem to cause a lot of confusion. In this tip, I focus on %CHECK and %SCAN. I decided to re-visit this particular tip because of the recent introduction of %SCAN’s companion BIF %SCANR and a related enhancement to %SCAN itself. More on this later.

  The %SCAN BIF has been with us since V3R7, when it was introduced along with %EDITC and %EDITW, to improve string handling. %CHECK, on the other hand, is …

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• Latest IBM i TRs To Ship Next Month

  August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM unveiled a pair of out-of-bound technology refreshes (TRs) for the IBM i operating system last week. In addition to supporting the new Power Systems E980 server, IBM i 7.3 TR5 and 7.2 TR9 bring a set of enhancements to the platform’s database, development tools, and the administrative interface.

  The IBM i installed base has grown accustomed to seeing operating system updates in the spring and the fall. This twice-a-year pattern has been with us, more or less, since IBM shifted to the TR approach several years ago. But IBM broke with that tradition last week when it announced that …

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• Guru: A Bevy of BIFs – %Dec to the Rescue

  August 1, 2018 Susan Gantner

  Author’s Note: This tip was first published back in 2009. I’ve updated the code examples here to use free format declarations. In addition I’ve added the potential use of %ScanRpl, which didn’t exist at the original publication date.

  More and more in RPG applications these days, it seems we need to process data that comes from “the dark side.” Translation: from a non-i system. This data could be coming from a browser screen via an RPG CGI program, from a CSV (comma-separated values) flat file, from an XML or JSON document, or myriad other ways. One thing these dark sources …

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