Addition to the May presentations

On Tuesday May 26, 6:30 PM (CT), The Central Texas IBM i User Group, CTXiUG, welcomes COMMON Americas Executive Vice President Marina Schwenk as their guest speaker.

She will be talking about what is modern RPG? What does it mean? And how you can implement it.

The meeting is free, online, and open to all. Register now to avoid missing out on what is going to be a very educational presentation, here.

PowerUp attendees rally to join RPGPGM.COM-unity

The RPGPGM.COM-unity continues to grow. I handed out more of the ribbons at this year's COMMON PowerUp than I have at any other event. You can see who I gave them to here.

If you see me at an IBM i event feel free to introduce yourself to me. In all likelihood I will have a RPGPGM.COM-unity ribbon on me, and you can join the community. All I ask in return is a photograph of you with it.

If you would like to learn more about the RPGPGM.COM-unity click here.

Determining the number of entries in a list parameter from a command

I was creating a command with what I am going to call a "list parameter", to allow the entry of up to ten libraries. While writing the Command Processing Program, CPP, I encountered something I could not find a good description of how to handle. Therefore, I am writing this post to give you a good example of how I did it.

I am not going to go into too much detail on how to create commands and their parameters as I covered many of the basics in two earlier posts: Creating your own commands, part 1 and Creating your own commands, part 2.

My example command, MYCMD, has just one parameter, which will be the list of up to ten libraries. The source for the command is as follows:

01 CMD PROMPT('List of libraries') 02 PARM KWD(LIBRARY) TYPE(*NAME) MIN(1) MAX(10) + 03 PROMPT('Libraries')

Line 2 and 3: The command parameter LIBRARY has a number of keywords:

• KWD:  The keyword name for the parameter
• TYPE:  It is a name type parameter, which means it is equivalent of ten long character
• MIN:  The minimum number of entries that must be given
• MAX:  The maximum number of allowed entries
• PROMPT:  The description that appears on the screen

May presentations

The 2026 System i Developer Lunch & Learn series is upon us, with nine online prestenations from Tuesday May 12 - Thursday May 28. I will be making two of them:

• Thursday May 21 at 1:00 PM ET:  Simon's top five SQL favorites
• Thursday May 28 at 1:00 PM ET:  A few of Simon's favorite RPG BiFs

The speakers are all IBM i experts and the presentations are free, click here to see what they are about.

I always register for all of them as I find I learn something new from them every one of them.