• 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 …

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• 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

  …

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• 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 …

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• 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 …

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• 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 …

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• 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, …

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• Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 2

  June 10, 2024 Chris Ringer

  Hello again! Part 1 of Web Concepts for the RPG Developer was an introduction on how to build components in an HTTP request and I hope you enjoyed it. Part 2 is just a continuation of that vast topic because there is so much to learn. I encourage you to click on the links in this article and explore on your own too.

  JSON

  A web API endpoint may require the data in the body of an HTTP POST request to be constructed as JSON (“jay sahn,” short for JavaScript Object Notation). JSON is formatted text (a string) containing key:value …

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• Guru: With Procedure Driven RPG, Be Precise With Options(*Exact)

  June 3, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  Introduced to the RPG language in V7R2 TR1 and V7R3 TR7, the Options(*Exact) enables RPG programmers to adopt a more defensive coding style. Defensive coding is something all developers should be practicing.

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

  **Free
  Ctl-Opt Main(Test_Exact_Options);
  Ctl-Opt Debug Option(*SrcStmt:*NoDebugIO);
  

  …

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• Guru: Testing URLs With HTTP_GET_VERBOSE

  May 20, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  In my previous article Fooling around with SQL and RPG, I explored having a little fun with the HTTP_GET function to fetch a witty Dad Joke from https://icanhazdadjoke.com/. In this article, I want to demonstrate a more practical use of this great function. Or should I say, another version of HTTP_GET, that is HTTP_GET_VERBOSE, which also was introduced to us by the DB2 team in V7R3.

  In its simplest implementation, I can insert the URL I want to test into an SQL statement:

  select *
  from table(QSYS2.HTTP_GET_VERBOSE('https://icanhazdadjoke.com/',''))
  

  I will later want to run this embedded in an RPG …

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• Guru: The OpenAI API – The Easy Way

  May 13, 2024 Dan Darnell

  When it comes to programming in a particular programming language there is what you can do and what you can do easily. I use RPG every day and have done so since the System/34 days. I love the language but I’ve also picked up other programming languages over time because sometimes RPG isn’t the right tool for the job.

  I’ve been using IBM EGL – Enterprise Generation Language – to create IBM i applications since 2009. IBM made a push at one time to entice RPG programmers to pick up the language and toolset (Rational Business Developer) for modernization …

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