Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Easy to create shortcut commands

creating your own shortcut commands

After my post about how to create your own commands I received messages from readers giving me examples of how they have created their own shortcut commands, to do the same as the standard IBM i command but shorter. In one example the command SP did the same as WRKSPLF.

I don't think many people know of proxy commands. These allow me to create shortcut commands of the regular IBM i commands without any programming. You can even make proxies of proxy commands, although I cannot think of a reason why I would ever think to do so.

In this example I am going to create a proxy command, SP, for the Work with Spooled Files command, WRKSPLF.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Sending your own program created messages to the error subfile

filling the error subfile, errsfl, with program generated message

I have previously written about using the error subfile to display error messages, rather than the message subfile. Personally I like using the error subfile as it is another case of allowing the operating system to do the work for me.

Since publishing that article I have received messages asking how can people create their own error message text, in the RPG program, that is displayed in the error subfile.

Fortunately there is a simple way to do this that will work in either RPG in CL.

No matter which language I use the display file can be the same. Here is the display file I will be using in this example.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Built in function to return name of procedure

%proc built in function to return procedure name

Until the last round of Technical Refreshes, IBM i 7.2 TR7 and 7.3 TR3, I could not find a way to retrieve the name of the procedure that I was in. The program data structure enticed me with the *PROC keyword. This was not the procedure's name, but rather either the program's or module's name.

01  DPgmDs           SDS                  qualified
02  D ProcName          *PROC

01  dcl-ds PgmDs psds qualified ;
02    ProcName *proc ;
03  end-ds ;

Fortunately these two Technical Refreshes introduced a new built in function, BiF, to returns the name of the current procedure: %PROC

This example is of what I call a closed subprocedure and how this new BiF works.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Handling nulls in CL

in a cl program how to handle a null value from a file

I have written previously about how to handle nulls values in RPG and in SQL, but until this week I had never had a problem with null in a CL program.

The CL program was "reading" a SQL table, where some columns/fields were null.

    ORDNBR      ORDSTS       ORDVALUE
01 PO18087       P            145.67
02 PO18556       C             15.36
03 PO18223       -                  -
04 PO18777       D                  -

The CL program is simple.