• Guru: Taming The CRTSRVPGM Command – Options That Can Save Your Sanity

  January 19, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  If you have ever run CRTSRVPGM without paying attention to its parameters, you are not alone. Many developers just accept the defaults and move on, only to discover later that those defaults can introduce subtle bugs or unnecessary headaches. The command looks simple, but it is packed with options that can either make your life easier or create a ticking time bomb in your system. Let’s talk about a couple of the most important ones.

  One parameter that deserves special attention is OPTION. By default, this parameter is blank, which seems harmless, but that blank value means you’re allowing duplicate …

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• Guru: CRTSRVPGM Parameters That Can Save or Sink You

  January 12, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  It was 2 a.m., and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. A production job had failed, and the error logs weren’t making any sense. After an hour of digging, the culprit finally revealed itself: the wrong procedure had been bound in a service program. Somehow, a silent duplicate had snuck through, and everything downstream was broken. If you’ve ever been in that situation, you know that “it compiles, it runs” is the worst mindset you can have when creating service programs. The parameters on CRTSRVPGM exist for a reason, and ignoring them can turn a simple build into a nightmare at …

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• Guru: A First Look at Bob, The IBM i Assistant That’s Closer Than You Think

  December 8, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  I recently was granted early access to IBM’s new Project Bob, and I have been putting the Bob-IDE through its paces to understand what IBM is aiming for and what IBM i developers should expect as the offering matures. Bob is IBM’s emerging AI-powered development assistant and IDE ecosystem designed to modernize how developers work on the IBM i.

  One of the first things that stands out is that the Bob-IDE is not an extension like the older WCA4i project, which was in extension form. IBM learned a lot from that experience, and those lessons led them to take a …

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• Guru: Playing Sounds From An RPG Program

  October 20, 2025 Mike Larsen

  I received a request to play audio sounds when an event took place on a display file. I hadn’t done this before, but I thought it was interesting to find out how it could be done. As with many tasks, it turns out there are more than one way to do this. My goal was to choose a method to make the process as seamless as possible.

  At first, the request was to play two sounds: one that would signal a positive event, and another to signal a negative event. But, as I started working with the project, I found …

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• Guru: Decoding Base64 ASCII

  August 18, 2025 Chris Ringer

  A co-worker of mine recently asked me how to decode a base64 ASCII string in RPG, received from an HTTP response. My response was “that’s easy”, simply use the relevant SQL function BASE64_DECODE. I promptly wrote some sample code and after some debugging I realized this function threw me a curveball.

  Let me demonstrate the issue and offer a simple solution.

  01 **Free
  02 ctl-opt DftActGrp(*No) Copyright('(C) Chris Ringer');
  
  03 dcl-s string_UTF8   varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  04 dcl-s base64_UTF8   varchar(1350) ccsid(*UTF8);
  05 dcl-s decoded_UTF8  varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  06 dcl-s decoded_Hex   varchar(1000) ccsid(*HEX);
  
  07 Exec SQL Set Option Commit=*NONE, Naming=*SYS;
  08 string_UTF8 = 

  …

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• Guru: When Procedure Driven RPG Really Works

  July 14, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  In the vast and varied ecosystems of Earth, few interactions between species have captured the imagination of scientists and casual observers alike as much as the relationship between bottlenose dolphins and puffer fish. This curious dance, often involving the deliberate provocation of the puffer fish to trigger its natural defense mechanism, has led to many interpretations – from simple play to speculative pharmacological experimentation. I submit to you today, that in the digital ocean of RPG development, developers should interact with their procedures in ways that, to the outside eye, might seem equally cryptic, yet are deeply intentional, meticulously orchestrated, …

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• Guru: Unlocking The Power Of %CONCAT And %CONCATARR In RPG

  April 14, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  When working with strings in RPG, especially in modern free-format code, the %CONCAT and %CONCATARR built-in functions (BIFs) offer efficient and readable solutions for combining strings. These functions simplify the process of concatenating multiple string values, making your code cleaner and easier to maintain. In this article, we will explore how they work and demonstrate their practical applications.

  The %CONCAT BIF allows you to combine multiple strings. It’s a more efficient and readable alternative to traditional concatenation using the + operator.

  Here’s a simple example:

  **Free
  Ctl-Opt Main(CONCAT_1) ActGrp(*Caller);
  
  Dcl-Pr pause ExtProc('sleep');
    time_to_sleep Uns(10) Value;
  End-Pr;
  
  Dcl-Proc CONCAT_1;
  
    Dcl-S firstName 

  …

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• Guru: Creating An RPG Stored Procedure That Returns A Result Set

  March 17, 2025 Mike Larsen

  In the previous article, I showed how to create an RPG stored procedure that uses parameters. In this article, I’m going to show how to create an RPG stored procedure that returns a result set, as we would likely encounter this scenario more frequently. The data used in this example comes from the Department table from IBM’s Sample database.

  I created an RPG program (Figure 1) that selects all rows from the Departments table. I didn’t add any selection criteria as I know there aren’t many rows in the table, but you may want to limit the number of rows …

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• Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With Continue

  March 10, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  In my last article, I shared a brief introduction to the GitHub Copilot extensions. These extensions provide an easy way to get up and running with an AI coding assistant to aid you in your RPG development. Being cloud based, it’s lightweight in terms of system resources, but it does cost a little money per month, per user.

  For this article, I would like to share with you what I have learned about a newer extension for VS Code named Continue. Continue runs locally on your PC, is 100 percent free, and as of this writing, is the leading …

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• 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 …

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