• Wanted: Native RPG and COBOL Support for Browsers

  March 23, 2005 Brian Kelly

  Back in the 1990s, when client/server was the big thing, the AS/400 was missing from the party. IBM Rochester’s position was that customers could get that type of system from the company’s PC line of business. At about the same time, when the Internet was the next big thing, IBM Rochester’s position was that Internet facility was already provided in the server line by the RS/6000 Unix box. Again, the AS/400 was conspicuously absent from the party. And that party is still going on!

  

  Louis Gerstner, IBM’s former chairman and CEO, coined the term “server-centric” before he coined the term

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• Rounding Over a Set of Rows

  March 16, 2005 Michael Sansoterra

  The code for this article is available for download.

  Sometimes, a seemingly simple thing like rounding can present thorny issues. This is particularly true when the rounding has to take into account an arbitrary number of values. To illustrate, consider the example of a retail point-of-sale application that requires the rounded state sales tax and local sales tax to be recorded at the sales line level instead of at the header level.

  This can get tricky because the rounded tax amount calculated at the header may not equal the sum of the tax amounts calculated against the line as

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• More About the SAVRSTxxx Commands

  March 16, 2005 Hey, Colleagues!

  It turns out quite a few of you are interested in The Save-Restore Commands. I got a lot of comments in response to that article. Here are some of them. I hope they’ll be of benefit to you. If I can find a way to test some things, I will have more information for you later. Thanks to all who wrote.

  –Ted

  

  The SAVRSTxxx commands are very nice commands indeed. We have been using them for some years now. But you should have mentioned that these commands are only available if you have installed OS/400 Option 22 (ObjectConnect).

  –André

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• Admin Alert: Using OS/400 Autostart Jobs for Repetitious Server Processing

  March 16, 2005 Joe Hertvik

  Most OS/400 shops have a need to run permanent server jobs that handle repetitious processing requests for system users. These jobs need to start whenever an OS/400 subsystem servicing a specific workload begins; they answer user processing requests, and they always need to be running. Fortunately, IBM provides an autostart jobs feature that is useful for creating and running OS/400-based server jobs.

  

  As the name implies, autostart jobs are attached to specific OS/400 subsystems and they start automatically whenever their associated subsystem is started, which makes them perfect candidates to run subsystem initialization jobs. They can also perform repetitive work

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• Recursion and the Alternatives

  March 9, 2005 Ted Holt

  The code for this article is available for download.

  Recursion is usually defined as the ability of a process (a program, a subprocedure, and so forth) to call itself. It is a fun topic to write about and a fun technique to use in programming. Recursion often simplifies the effort required to code a task in a computer language. However, recursion is not without its drawbacks. In this article, I hope to help readers determine when recursion is appropriate and to suggest alternatives to use when recursion is not suitable.

  

  An Example of Recursion

  To illustrate the concepts that

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• PC5250 and the Print Key

  March 9, 2005 Hey, Ted

  I have a tip for your newsletter. For ages, I have always used the PrtScrn button from a Client Access PC5250 terminal emulation session to print the contents of a display on my local network printer. Recently, I needed the screen contents to go to an output queue instead, as would occur when I would press the Print key on dumb terminals in ages past. It took a while, but I found the key sequence for the Print key.

  To send the contents of a display screen to an output queue, use Control NumLock. I could not find this information

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• Admin Alert: Creating a Save Changed Objects

  March 9, 2005 Joe Hertvik

  
  Backup Tape

  Like most operating systems, OS/400 provides a save changed objects function, allowing you to selectively backup only those objects that have changed since the last full system backup. This week, I’ll examine the save changed objects procedure and give you some simple CL code for creating a saved objects backup tape. A save changed object backup works in conjunction with a full system backup to minimize weekly backup times and to enable administrators to restore objects from several different tapes in a backup cycle.

  

  The two backups work together in the following way:

  • The full system or Save

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• Embedding SQL in /free

  March 2, 2005 Joel Cochran

  I’ve been hooked on free-format RPG since I first upgraded to V5R1. In fact, I have immersed myself so deeply into /free that I almost feel uncomfortable when I have to maintain fixed-format code. I’ll assume if you are reading this article that you are already aware of the virtues of free-format. In total fairness, I will also acknowledge that working with free-format certainly has some undesirable aspects. Listing and discussing them would be an entire article in its own right, and maybe one I’ll contemplate soon. But in this article I’d like to address the one that personally bugs

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• Much Ado About an Override

  March 2, 2005 Ted Holt

  
  

  Just when I think I’ve seen it all, along comes something unexpected. A dedicated reader of this column, one of the several Davids who writes me regularly, recently sent me an email with a line of CL code and the question, “Why does this work?”

  This is the CL command:

  OVRDBF FILE(REPORT) TOFILE(QSYSPRT)
  

  If nothing appears out of kilter, then take a look at the following RPG file specs:

  Fqsysprt   o    f  132        printer oflind(*inof)
  Freport    o    f  132        printer oflind(*inov)
  

  Or, if you prefer, the COBOL equivalent from the environment division:

  Select print1 assign to printer-qsysprt.
  Select print2 assign 

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• Admin Alert: IBM Has Changed the +/- One Release Rule for V5R1 Upgrades

  March 2, 2005 Joe Hertvik

  In a previous column on upgrading OS/400 V5R1 to version V5R3, I stated that the primary partition of an OS/400 machine must be running OS/400 V5R2 in order to support multiple secondary partitions running either OS/400 V5R1 or V5R3 (the +/- one release rule). I was wrong, as I recently learned that IBM had changed the +/- one release rule, enabling you to run an OS/400 V5R3 secondary partition under a V5R1 primary partition.

  

  To refresh your memory, the +/- one release rule means for OS/400 V4R5 and V4R4 (the first two releases to support logical partitioning), the OS/400

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