Redpaper: Tools and Solutions for Modernizing

IBM has published a new Redpaper today called Tools and Solutions for Modernizing Your IBM i Applications, it is a companion to the earlier Redbook Modernize IBM i Applications from the Database up to the User Interface and Everything in Between, from July 2014.

It describes independent software vendor (ISV) and Business Partner tools that can be used to modernize your IBM i applications.

It includes the following chapters:

1. Mobile, web, and client solutions
2. Database modernization tools
3. Security
4. Tools for understanding and modernizing RPG and COBOL
5. Source control and project management

You can download it, as a PDF, here.

You can find a link to its companion Redbook here.

How to map an IFS folder as a Windows share folder

After reading the post Easy way to convert CSV file to DDS file Martin Coates emailed me with the following question:

How do you map a folder in the IFS and share is on the pc? I am an As400 “purist” but more and more I find programming requests overflowing into the pc domain.

In this post I will discuss how to create a folder in the IFS, and then how to share it as a folder that can be accessed by a Windows PC. If you already know how to create folders in the IFS feel free to skip to the second part.

• How to create a folder in the IFS
• How to share the IFS folder
• How to map the folder to the Windows PC

Use QTEMP for your work files

This post is inspired by a situation that I encountered a couple of weeks ago that left me flabbergasted. It started with a phone call from a department head complaining that another department was eating into his department's time to run a report. At first I was confused, and after talking to three department heads I discovered that each one has a time they can run this report. Department A can run the report with any selection criteria they desire from 8:00 – 8:59 AM, Department B can do the same from 9:00 – 9:59 AM, and Department C from 10:00 – 10:59 AM. Anyone can run the report in the afternoon, but only after calling the other departments to make sure they are not running the report at the same time.

Why was this an issue? In this job the programmer who had created it used a work file that was in a production library. Therefore, only one person could run the report at a time to ensure that only one department's data was included in the report. If two people ran the report at the same time the work file could contain mixed data from both jobs. I also found that when the job completed the work file was not cleared, still containing all of the data from the last run, wasting disk space.

The programmer who created these programs has retired so I was not able to ask the question I wanted to: Why?

Looking at library list for the jobs from this application I found that QTEMP was in the library below all of the production libraries. Could this be the reason why?

Accessing multiple member files in SQL

I was recently asked the following question, via Facebook:

How we can read a particular member of physical file thru SQL EXEC in RPGLESQL program ?

Others suggested using "Override with Data Base File" (OVRDBF) command, which could be used. But there is a way to do this just in SQL.

Row and Column Access Contol Redbook now available

RCAC stands for "Row and Column Access Control", which is one of the features introduced in release 7.2 to DB2 for i (SQL).

Since the release announcement I have seen many questions asking what it is and how to implement it. IBM must have seen the same and have created a new Redbook called: Row and Column Access Support in DB2 for IBM i. You can download it here.

To accompany the release of the Redbook is this brief video of Mike Cain, one of the members of the DB2 for i Center of Excellence team, giving an overview of RCAC.

FTP i-to-i part 3

In the past two posts about this subject I discussed how to manually copy files from one IBM i to another using FTP, File Transfer Protocol. In this post I am going to demonstrate how to create a program to start FTP, execute FTP subcommands, and then produce a printed log of what happened.

The program I will show is very simple and can be used for any types FTP subcommands. In this post I will use the example I discussed in Part 2, to copy a number of files from one library on QSRV1 to another library on QSRV2, and then call the program on QSRV2 to process the copied files.