• Guru Classic: iSphere Plug-in Expands RSE/RDi Toolset

  January 8, 2020 Susan Gantner

  My series of three Guru tips on the free iSphere plug-in first appeared in 2015. Since I still find that most RDi users haven’t heard of it, I’ve decided to repeat the series as Guru Classics. I’ve made a few updates to this first one in the series due to enhancements made to both RDi and iSphere in the intervening years.

  Followers of my Guru tips know that I’m a big RDi fan. These days I would be lost trying to write or maintain RPG code without things like RDi’s Outline, Error feedback, editor filtering, and Undo. But you know …

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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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• Guru Classic: Don’t Ignore the View

  January 8, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in April 2009. The use of DDL and embedded SQL have come a long way since then but the basic premise of the article still applies. I have removed the embedded SQL example using a SELECT * since this is a style that I no longer recommend (from the point of view of self-documenting code, possible performance gains and breaking old habits of thinking in records). I also changed the example of reformatting a numeric date column to use a DATES table as opposed to functions (a faster and better approach). I removed …

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• Guru Classic: Looking for Commitment, Part 3

  August 14, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  As companies look to modernize their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. This set of three articles about commitment control was originally published in March of 2009. (See Related Stories below.) The content of the articles has been updated for free-form RPG. In this article, I will take a closer look at how commitment control works by looking at the journal entries for commitment control. I will also discuss the LCKLVL and CMTSCOPE parameters on the STRCMTCTL command.

  Commitment Control And Journals

  Commitment control is dependent upon the use of a journal. A journal is used in conjunction …

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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: Everybody Likes Shortcuts! Part 1, Navigation

  August 14, 2019 Susan Gantner

  I wrote the original version of this tip a few years ago but I still find a lot of RPGers aren’t using keyboard shortcuts as much as I think they should be. Since shortcuts can make you so much more productive, I’m re-visiting this topic with a few updates for changes in more recent versions of RDi. It’s also a follow-on to my last Guru Classic tip on RDi keyboard shortcuts.

  I’ve seen a particularly sharp increase in the use of RDi (or Rational Developer for i) by RPGers in recent years. I suspect that has a lot to …

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• Guru Classic: My Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts for RSE/RDi

  July 17, 2019 Susan Gantner

  When using RDi for editing my CL, DDS, RPG, or COBOL code, I find that I can save a lot of time by using keyboard shortcuts for functions that would otherwise require that I take my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. So I thought I would share a few of my favorites. Many of the shortcuts I use are standard for other applications that I also use for email, spreadsheets or text editing. It’s easy to forget that some of those same shortcuts can be used when we’re editing our RPG code.

  A lot has changed on …

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• Guru Classic: The New Basics — Indicators

  July 17, 2019 Jon Paris

  The history of indicators pre-dates even the earliest versions of RPG and takes us all the way back to the old tabulating machines, perhaps even earlier depending on how broad a definition one uses. What is without doubt, though, is that indicators in the sense of *INnn and *INLR were added to the RPG language as a vehicle for translating those old tabulator board programs.

  RPG has grown a lot since those early days, and yet many people still write code using the old-style numbered indicators. LR? Well, we’re kind of stuck with that, but there hasn’t been a need …

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• Guru Classic: Looking For Commitment, Part 2

  July 17, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  As companies look to modernize their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. This set of three articles was originally published in March 2009. The content of the articles has been updated for free form RPG.

  In this article I will take a look at the basic rules and coding requirements for using commitment control within RPG programs.

  A Database

  This is the SQL used to create a schema named COMMIT, which contains two related tables called HEADER and DETAILS.

  (A)  CREATE SCHEMA "COMMIT" ;
  
  (B)  CREATE TABLE COMMIT/HEADER (
       	"KEY" CHAR(2) CCSID 37 NOT NULL DEFAULT '' ,
       	

  …

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• Guru Classic: Looking For Commitment, Part 1

  June 19, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This set of three articles was originally published in March of 2009. (See links in Related Stories below). As companies look to modernizing their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. In my next three Guru Classic articles, I will be updating the content of these articles for free-form RPG.

  In this article, I will discuss what commitment control is, why you may want to use it, and the basic requirements for commitment control. In subsequent articles, I will look more closely at how commitment control works, different ways in which it can be implemented, …

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