It’s surprising how many times you need to know whether a record exists in any one of two or more tables. Traditionally, you would have to check each table individually until you either find a match or have checked every Read more…
Several months ago, I talked about Debugging RPG Programs in Batch and said that, before you submit your job, you should first hold the job queue. While this isn’t bad advice, exactly, it’s not what I actually do. When I Read more…
I have talked about service programs in the past and, at the time, I mentioned that you need a binding source without really saying why. So, to revisit the subject, using the binding language allows you to change your service Read more…
Last week I mentioned the CPYTOIMPF command and how easy it makes reformatting data so that it can be handled by other platforms. Not surprisingly the IBM i makes it just as easy to handle data coming back with the Read more…
One of the many things that the IBM i (and its predecessors) has always been good at is exchanging data with other platforms. And one thing that often surprises me is that people often don’t realise just how easy sharing Read more…
Here’s handy: The ON-EXIT operation code begins the ON-EXIT section. The ON-EXIT section contains code that runs every time that the procedure ends, whether it ends normally or abnormally. The ON-EXIT section runs under the following conditions: The procedure reaches Read more…
This is as much a reminder to myself as anything else because the %CHAR built in function has the unfortunate behaviour of stripping leading zeroes when converting a number to a character value. Sometimes I need to keep those leading Read more…
CL is an often undervalued part of the i developer’s toolkit, and one that IBM have been quietly enhancing over the years. It does have some quirks however, the most annoying being that if you are reading a file, once Read more…
The SQL TRANSLATE function is worth knowing about if you ever find yourself needing to (for example) fix data from an external feed before you attempt to do anything with it. The function requires returns a value in which one Read more…
I mentioned the DSPPGMREF command a couple of weeks ago. This command allows you to generate a list of system objects used by specified programs and is particularly handy when you want to see which programs are doing what to Read more…