• bsearch: A Better %LOOKUP

  February 8, 2012 Jon Paris

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. In qsort: A Better SORTA, I described the use of the qsort API. This time, we’ll be looking at its companion API–bsearch–which, as its name suggests, is used to perform searches. Recent changes in array support in RPG, including V6.1’s abilities to define large arrays, means that I use bsearch less frequently than I used to. Nevertheless, the fact that I write the code that controls the matching still makes it useful. For example, I can code bsearch to search for a partial string, which is something

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• How Do I Export an iSeries Certificate File?

  January 25, 2012 Hey, Joe

  I’m trying to export one of my i5/OS digital certificates into a PC file for server installation. Every time I try the export function, I get the message: An error occurred while opening files to write. What’s going on and how can I export the certificate to a file? I’m running i5/OS V5R4M5. –Abe It could be the way you’re trying to export the file. Here’s how I’ve successfully downloaded digital certificates in the past, and where I’ve hit that particular message. Maybe this technique will help you export your certificate. 1. Start the IBM Web Administration for i

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• qsort: A Better SORTA

  January 25, 2012 Jon Paris

  Over the past few years I’ve done quite a lot of PHP coding alongside my RPG work, and PHP’s extensive use of arrays has furthered my conviction that we RPGers just don’t use arrays nearly enough. There are many reasons for this, of course, one of which is RPG’s limited ability to sort and search arrays. Admittedly in recent releases the restrictions have been somewhat alleviated, but there are still many limitations. For example, take a look at the DS below: d customerData ds Dim(1000) Qualified d name 30a d address1 40a d address2 40a d city 30a d state

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• Limited Capabilities Workaround

  January 25, 2012 Patrick Botz

  Limited capabilities is a widely used security function of IBM i. User profiles have an attribute named limited capabilities or LMTCPB. CL commands have an attribute named allow limited capabilities users or ALWLMTUSR). CL commands set to ALWLMTUSR(*NO) cannot be run from a command line by user profiles set to LMTCPB(*YES). To be more precise, these commands cannot be run from a command line, the command-entry display, FTP, REXEC, the QCAPCMD API, or as an option from a command grouping menu. This is all well and good. Sometimes, however, you run into situations where a few user profiles, that should

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• New in DB2 for i 7.1: Use Global Variables to Track Environment Settings

  January 11, 2012 Michael Sansoterra

  The concept of having a locally maintained application “scratch pad” to keep track of session specific information has been around for quite awhile. RPG applications have long used the LDA (Local Data Area) to track common information meant to be shared between programs within a job. (This saves developers the trouble of passing around all of this common information as parameters.) Likewise, many operating systems have the concept of an environment variable, which is similarly used to maintain and publish many OS-defined and user-defined values. Under IBM i 7.1, SQL offers something called a global variable, which can be

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• Admin Alert: Is It a Performance Issue or a Throughput Issue?

  January 11, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  It’s common for Power i users to complain their batch jobs are running too slowly. But is system capability responsible for slow batch throughput or could the problem be caused by poor work management procedures? This week, let’s look at a few scenarios where users say their batch jobs are running too slowly and discuss what, if anything (short of a hardware upgrade), can help speed up batch processing. Getting To the Bottom of Slow Batch Processing Users who feel that their batch work isn’t completing in a timely manner may blame that perceived slowness on the system hardware. This

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• IBM i and Zip Files

  January 11, 2012 Ted Holt

  You may have heard of the new zip file APIs–QZipZip and QZipUnzip–that IBM added to IBM i 7.1. I am looking forward to using them. But if your shop is like mine, that is, you’re not running 7.1, there’s another way to work with zip files, and it does a good job. The other way is the Java Archive utility, or jar. It’s an easy command to use, and it runs under Qshell. Here’s how it works. The jar command has several parameters. First is a case-sensitive list of options. You will always need a lowercase “f” option. Second is

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