SBMJOB’s RQSDTA Parameter
December 11, 2002 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hey, Ted:
In the “Odds and Ends” column that published in Midrange Guru on November 8, 2002, you wrote about appending an extra character to the end-of-character parameters that are longer than 32 characters in order to pass them through the Submit Job (SBMJOB) command without running into the problem of garbage data replacing trailing blanks. There is another alternative.
The alternative choice is to use the Request Data (RQSDTA) parameter instead of the Command (CMD) parameter.
These two simple example CL programs show the difference:
TstSbmPgm: pgm
dcl &cmdstr *char 64 value( 'sndmsg hi MyMsgQ' )
dcl &xgarbage *char 64 value( 'who knows?????? ' )
sbmjob ??rqsdta( 'call TstSndMsg parm(''' *cat &CmdStr +
*cat ''' ''' *cat &XGarbage *cat ''')' )
sbmjob ??cmd( call pgm(TstSndMsg) parm(&CmdStr &XGarbage) )
return
endpgm
And:
TstSndMsg: pgm ( + &pCmdStr + &pXGarbage + ) dcl &pCmdStr *char 64 dcl &pXGarbage *char 64 dcl &CmdLen *dec ( 15 5 ) value( 64 ) call QCmdExc ( + &pCmdStr + &CmdLen + ) return endpgm
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The first runs SBMJOB in two ways: one using RQSDTA and the other using CMD. Both CALLs run the second program, which simply tries to run the content of the first parameter as a command with QCMDEXC. If any garbage shows up at the end of the first parameter, QCMDEXC will cancel. (Note that I use hard-coded message queue MyMsgQ.) In this case, RQSDTA works and CMD fails.
In general, building a command string and using RQSDTA allows you to be precise, while using CMD to build the command string for you allows you to take advantage of the command prompter for formatting. Originally, the CMD parameter wasn’t available; I recall it was added in an early release of OS/400 to help with difficulties such as embedded quotes in character parameters and numeric values.
CMD is so easy to use that RQSDTA has almost been forgotten.
— Tom
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