• ARCAD Hooks Cross-Reference Tool into LPEX Editor

  August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers won’t have to leave the comfort of RDi and the LPEX editor to engage in application cross-referencing tasks, thanks to the recent integration between the ARCAD Observer cross-referencing software with LPEX.

  According to ARCAD Software, the new LPEX integration will bring “massive productivity benefits” to IBM i developers in the form of context-sensitive “where used” impact analysis, as well as dependency information, all delivered directly from within the LPEX editor.

  LPEX integration is a new feature delivered in late June in ARCAD Observer version 12.1. The company, which has offices in France, New Hampshire and Chicago …

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• Guru: Dynamic Arrays Come To RPG – The Next Part Of The Story

  August 17, 2020 Jon Paris

  In my first tip on this topic I covered the automatic sizing option (*AUTO) for the new dynamic arrays. In this tip I am going to look at the second option (*VAR), which allows the programmer to directly control the capacity of the array, growing and shrinking it as required. In addition I will also briefly cover the third option (*CTDTA) which, as you may have guessed, relates to compile time arrays.

  Using A Varying Length Array

  Let’s start with a brief example of using a variable sized array in conjunction with SQL. This approach answers the classic question of …

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• IBM Rolls Out ACS 1.1.8.5

  August 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week introduced a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS), the popular IBM i client that’s used by administrators, programmers, and engineers alike. There are enhancements to Run SQL Scripts, new 5250 viewing options, and a performance boost for viewing selected files on the IFS with version 1.1.8.5, among other mostly minor updates.

  According to the release notes associated with the new iteration of ACS, IBM made a handful of changes with version 1.1.8.5.

  Let’s start with the improvements to Run SQL Scripts, which is an increasingly popular utility in ACS that leverages the power of SQL and …

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• Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Comes To IBM i

  August 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is now supporting IBM i with Ansible, the open source configuration management software developed by Red Hat. By including IBM i and AIX as a supported target in Ansible, companies that run IBM i will be able to remotely configure and manage IBM i and AIX servers using the same Ansible tools and techniques that they use to manage mainstream X86 and cloud server environments.

  Ansible was created back in 2012 by Michael DeHaan, the author of the Cobbler provisioning server and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration. It’s been widely adopted …

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• Guru: Creating PDF Documents With Python

  July 27, 2020 Mike Larsen

  I’m often asked to create reports for my business partners. The format of the report depends on who made the request. If the financial team made the request, I may produce an Excel file. The CEO may want to report quarterly sales to their shareholders. In that case, I may produce a PDF using the company letterhead.

  In a prior article, I showed how to create Excel files using Db2 tables. Now I’m going to show how to create PDF documents using Db2 tables.

  This story contains code, which you can download here.

  I always start by making …

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• ARCAD Generates APIs From 5250 Screens

  July 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Many IBM i shops want to modernize their 5250 applications by developing REST-based Web services and API extensions, but they face difficulties getting started. These organizations may want to check out ARCAD Software’s latest offering, ARCAD API, which takes much of the pain and complexity out of the API generation process.

  REST-based APIs have become a standard method for exposing data and business logic to the outside world. There’s an abundance of ways that APIs can be used–pushing data to Web or mobile users, for example, or pulling data from a cloud-based CRM system. Just about any higher-level application function, …

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• IBMiUnit Moves RPG Unit Testing Forward

  June 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

  As IBM i shops break up their monolithic programs into more reusable chunks, it’s reasonable to assume that they would adopt unit testing to make sure those chunks are working properly before promoting them into production. Unit testing hasn’t been widely adopted on the IBM i platform, which is why RPG developers who are looking for a unit testing tool may be interested in a new framework called IBMiUnit.

  IBMiUnit is an open source project that helps programmers test any RPG-based program, subprocedure, or method, including RPG-based SQL. The software, which is modeled off the popular JUnit and xUnit frameworks, …

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• Why You Need To Implement Exit Point Security – Now

  June 15, 2020 Rich Loeber

  As everyone knows, the only truly secure computer is one that is not networked to any other system or any client, and that has no users doing anything at all on the system. And if you really want to be honest about it, you should probably turn its power off. Then, it would be perfectly secure – and perfectly useless as well.

  To make any system useful, it has to be opened up so it can be reached by the world, and it may be hard to remember this now, three decades after the client/server and Internet revolutions, but there …

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• Guru: SUBSET on EXECUTE and OPEN

  June 15, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  The DB2 for i Enhancements in IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 8 / IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 2 just made dynamic SQL, embedded in RPG, a lot easier to use. It includes an enhancement entitled USING SUBSET on EXECUTE and OPEN with Extended indicators. This enhancement provides a simple and effective solution to a problem that I first highlighted in an article I wrote back in September of 2015. (See A First Look At SQL Descriptors.)

  The “problem” we are dealing with is how to handle a variable number of host variables being used in a dynamic …

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• Guru: Graphical Debugging Through ACS

  June 8, 2020 Ted Holt

  ACS (IBM i Access Client Solutions) keeps getting better and better. I can’t stay up-to-date with the latest releases of all the software I use, but I do everything I can to keep up-to-date with ACS. One of the handiest of the relatively most recent releases is the ability to access IBM i Debugger through Run SQL Scripts. If you haven’t tried IBM i Debugger, you’re missing out.

  IBM i Debugger (a.k.a. System Debugger) is part of the IBM Toolkit for Java. It’s graphical, and it makes the green-screen debugger (STRDBG) look like something built by cavemen. To show you …

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