• Guru: At Last! A Tool To Search an Output Queue!

  November 6, 2017 Ted Holt

  As far as I’m concerned, a technician can’t have too many tools! I appreciate the good people of IBM for the software tools they provide to help us do our jobs. I also appreciate those people who freely share software tools they’ve written. I’m pleased to pass along a tool from faithful reader Tim Swearingen.

  The tool is a CL command called Search an Output Queue (SRCHOUTQ), and it fills a gap. You can use SRCHOUTQ to look for a string inside the spooled files of an output queue. The search, I am happy to say, is case-insensitive. Here’s more …

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• Guru: Error Handling in SQL PL, Part 2

  October 16, 2017 Ted Holt

  In the previous episode of this exciting, action-packed series, I introduced you to the exception-handling methods that IBM has built into SQL PL. The cliff-hanger has lasted four months now, much too long. It’s high time I explained RESIGNAL, as I promised I would. I will explain SIGNAL while I’m at it.

  Before I start the syntax lesson, I need to explain a bit of philosophy. I use the hit-the-ball-drag-Harry method of exception-handling when I embed SQL in RPG and COBOL programs. That is, I execute a command, test the SQL state, execute a command, test the SQL state, …

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• Guru: Making Sense of Codes

  October 9, 2017 Ted Holt

  I have most likely never seen your database, yet I can tell you with confidence that it is full of codes. We can’t live without them. Codes give us shortcuts for all sorts of types and categories. They consume less storage than the values they represent. They help us keep the database clean and consistent within itself.

  But they surely can be hard to read. Some codes are obvious. M for male and F for female, for instance. My experience is that most are not so. Look at this and see how much sense you can make of it.

  select 

  …

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• Guru: IBM i, .Net, and XMLSERVICE Program and Subprocedure Calls

  September 25, 2017 Richard Schoen

  Our businesses have years of existing IBM i legacy applications that contain priceless business logic. We need to re-purpose that code without re-writing so our existing IBM i business logic can be accessed and used by our desktop applications, web applications, web services, and mobile device applications, which often expect JSON or XML-based data. Instead of re-writing your existing business logic, surface it so the code can be called as-is.

  For this article we’ll focus on the XMLSERVICE remote program call and remote subprocedure calls that can be used to call existing logic based in existing RPG, COBOL and CL …

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• Guru: Consuming A REST Web Service Using SQL And GET

  September 18, 2017 Mike Larsen

  The use of web services in the industry continues to grow, and sometimes it can be challenging to find information on how to work with them on IBM i. So, what is a web service? In a nutshell, web services allow systems to communicate via the web using file formats such as JSON and XML.

  This article demonstrates how to consume a REST web service using SQL. The example I’m working with uses the ‘GET’ verb to retrieve information from an Amazon Web Service (AWS). I created a simple REST Amazon Web Service that retrieves information about a pet from …

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• Guru: Legible Hexadecimal

  August 28, 2017 Ted Holt

  Since I am a normal red-blooded human being, I try to make life as easy as possible for myself. I don’t do very well in general, but occasionally I manage to afford myself a bit of comfort. Recently I had to deal with long strings of hexadecimal digits. Trying to read that stuff was more than I could deal with, so I wrote a function to help me.

  It’s easy to think of hexadecimal literal as strings because they contain the letters A through F. However, they are not strings, but numbers. We use the letters A through F for …

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• Guru: Teraspace To The Rescue

  August 14, 2017 Jon Paris

  Hey, Jon:

  My team has been trying to resolve a problem for the last few weeks and they are running into several obstacles. The main one has to do with RPG restrictions for data structure length.

  We use a third-party program to process transactions. In the latest version, the vendor has increased the length of the fields in the data structure that we have to pass them. After our programs were changed to accommodate this increase, the RPG program would not compile because the DS exceeds 16,733,104 bytes. The vendor has told us to use teraspace but by itself that …

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• Guru: The PHP Path To Victory, Part 2

  August 7, 2017 Chris Ringer

  Part 1 of this article discussed the path a PHP request takes on its way to your backend RPG program through the magic of an external SQL stored procedure. You may need to review the SQL, PHP, and RPG code there before continuing here. If you have not yet downloaded the code to your IBM i (found in Part 1), now would be a good time to do that.

  Part 2 will give you the confidence to troubleshoot those times when something unexpected occurs in this PHP environment. And if you are a developer for large company, the responsibility of …

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• Guru: Conditional SQL Unions

  July 17, 2017 Ted Holt

  SQL unions combine two or more result sets into one. That’s what they were designed to do. But unions also provide a way to choose between alternate result sets, i.e. to enable or disable SELECT statements at run time. I have used this feature to advantage on numerous occasions. Here’s how it’s done.

  First consider the nature of unions. Each result set of a union can return data or no data, depending on the criteria in the WHERE and HAVING clauses. If a SELECT retrieves no data, the system appends an empty set to the union result. The way to …

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• Guru: Storing Images In An SQL Table, Part 1

  June 26, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, we’ll look at how we can store images (or other media) in an SQL table on the IBM i. To accomplish this goal, we’ll write an RPG program that reads a table that has the name and location of the images from a folder in the IFS, and writes those images to a table.

  The images will be stored in a column that is defined as a BLOB data type. ‘BLOB’ stands for ‘Binary Large Object’, and is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single entity in a database. …

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