• 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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• Guru Classic: Call Again And Again And Again . . .

  January 16, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2011 and recently came to mind when I had a discussion with a programmer bemoaning the fact that he could not (so he thought) have a recursive process in RPG. The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since 2009. 

  In programming terms, recursion is the process whereby a function may call itself. Traditionally, this is something we are not used to in RPG. Programs and subroutines cannot call themselves. Or if you did somehow …

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• Guru: Easy Date Difference

  January 14, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  The dates in our database are stored as seven-digit packed-decimal values in the common CYYMMDD format. In 2018 I wrote an SQL query that reported the number of days between two dates, but it quit calculating properly as soon as it started using 2019 dates. Can you tell me the proper way to find the difference between two dates in days?

  –Becki

  I don’t know if “the” proper way exists or not, Becki, but I can show you how to do the required calculation. SQL has some handy built-in functions that address your problem.

  The DAYS function returns …

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• LANSA Bought By Software Conglomerate Idera

  January 7, 2019 Alex Woodie

  LANSA, one of the oldest independent software vendors targeting the IBM midrange server and arguably one of the most successful, has been acquired by Idera, a growing conglomerate of software companies that also owns Sencha, and which is owned in part by the same private equity firm behind HelpSystems.

  LANSA was founded in 1987 by Australian businessmen Peter Draney and Lyndsey Cattermole to create and sell software development tools for the IBM System/38. When IBM launched the AS/400 a year later, LANSA supported it with its fourth generation language (4GL) development environment. It hasn’t looked back, and today the company, …

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• All i Want For Christmas Is RDi Lite

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  All some IBM i community members wanted for the holidays was RDi Lite. Instead, they’re looking at IBM like the Grinch due to its decision not to offer a free, scaled-down version of the application development tool. What’s more, the community is expressing great displeasure at the manner in which IBM handled the matter through its Request for Enhancement (RFE) process.

  Hassan Farooqi kicked off the campaign for RDi Lite in August 2017, when he posted an RFE on the new IBM developerWorks website that’s designed to facilitate collaboration with its user communities by allowing them to submit ideas for …

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• An IBM i Year In Review

  December 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Another year is just about wrapped up for us here at IT Jungle. That means it’s time to ease off the news pedal just a tad and enter into a retrospective mood, with the hope of gaining some perspective on where we’ve been in 2018 and perhaps how we’ll start off 2019.

  It all started off rather poorly, way back in. . .

  January

  . . . when the big news was about Spectre and Meltdown, the two vulnerabilities that brought everybody rudely back to the real world following the New Year’s celebration. Nearly all types of processors, including …

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• Guru: Addressing A Legitimate Question

  December 10, 2018 Ted Holt

  This is the last Monday issue of The Four Hundred for 2018. My, how time flies! I like to do something different at year end. In previous years I have solved Sudoku puzzles, found my way through mazes, solved the peg game, and more. This year I wish to honor a request that has come from various people and to address what they consider to be a legitimate question.

  As I wrote recently, the question I hear occasionally goes something like this: “Why bother with service programs? Why not use dynamic calls?” Rather than insult the …

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• What Is The State Of Your IBM i Modernization?

  December 3, 2018 Amanda Blackburn

  (Sponsored Content) Each IBM i shop has its own history with the platform, and its own approach to dealing with change. Some run the server like it’s still 1988, while others have invested time and money to modernize their systems and applications. Understanding the state of modernization across the IBM i community as a whole can help us discover where each of us sits on this IBM i journey and help us prepare our organizations for new challenges and opportunities.

  The IBM i server turned 30 this year, which was the cause of much celebration at industry events around the …

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• High Schools: The New Recruiting Grounds for IT Jobs

  November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Companies that are having trouble filling entry-level IT jobs due to the tight job market and low unemployment rate may want to check out another resource for finding and attracting workers: their local high school.

  Recruitment, retention, and training of new talent are always hot topics during the roundtable discussions that take place at the CIO Summit. “It’s always a very fruitful and productive topic to see what CIOs are doing,” says Alan Seiden, who has been running the bi-annual event for IBM i tech executives for the past year-and-a-half.

  So when one of the CIOs at last month’s …

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• MB Software Gets A Handle On Remote SQL Jobs

  November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  System administrators who get frustrated with the inability to see which SQL jobs coming in through ODBC are causing problems on their IBM i server may be interested in a product called Work with Active SQL (WRKACTSQL) from MB Software and Consulting, which recently announced the tool will be free through the end of the year.

  SQL is just about as close to a universal language for business as you can get. While there are other (i.e. “native”) methods of fetching data from Db2 for i, nearly three-quarters of IBM i developers report using SQL, making it the number two …

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