The equivalent of MOVEA in all free RPG

There was a good question posted as a comment on the The different flavors of free format RPG post asking:

How do you move a array to field in free format. I did field1= arr1

In fixed format RPG I could use the Move Array operation code, MOVEA, to move data to and from arrays.

01 D Array S 2 dim(10) 02 D Var1 S 20 03 D i S 2 0 04 C 1 do 10 i 05 C eval Array(i) = %char(i) 06 C enddo 07 C movea Array Var1 08 C movea 'AaBbCcDdEeFf'Array 09 C eval *inlr = *on

Alas, when free format calculations came out, in 2001 as part of V5R1, MOVEA was not given a free format equivalent.

I am sure there are different approaches to achieve the same end. This is just my way to perform the equivalent of the MOVEA. I am going to give my code in all free, but I will give a fixed format version of the definitions later.

01 dcl-ds AllArray ; 02 Array char(2) dim(10) ; 03 end-ds ; 04 dcl-s Var1 char(20) ; 05 dcl-s i packed (2) ; 06 for i = 1 to %elem(Array) ; 07 Array(i) = %char(i) ; 08 endfor ; 09 Var1 = AllArray ; 10 AllArray = 'AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIi' ;

Lines 1: The array I am going to "MOVEA" needs to be in a data structure. In this example the data structure has the totally unimaginative name of AllArray.

Line 2: Here is the definition of the array. This is exactly the same way I would define a "standalone" array.

Line 3: End of the data structure.

lines 4 and 5: These are variables I will be using in this example.

Lines 6 – 8: Here I am loading the array. Rather than a Do-loop, as I did in the fixed format definition, I am using a For-loop instead. Notice how the "up to value" is coded. By using the %ELEM the For-loop will be performed the same number of times as there are elements in my array. If I was to change the number of elements in the array I would not have to change this line of code.

If I run this program in debug and place a breakpoint before the next line I can see my fully loaded array.

> EVAL array ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(1) = '1 ' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(2) = '2 ' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(3) = '3 ' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(4) = '4 ' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(5) = '5 ' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(6) = '6 ' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(7) = '7 ' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(8) = '8 ' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(9) = '9 ' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(10) = '10'

Line 9: I am moving the data structure into variable I defined on line 4. When I place a debug breakpoint before the next line of code I can see that the values of all the elements of the array have been moved to the variable:

VAR1 = '1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10'

Line 10: This line moves values from a string into the data structure and, therefore, the array. A debug breakpoint after this line would display:

> EVAL array ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(1) = 'Aa' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(2) = 'Bb' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(3) = 'Cc' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(4) = 'Dd' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(5) = 'Ee' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(6) = 'Ff' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(7) = 'Gg' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(8) = 'Hh' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(9) = 'Ii' ARRAY OF ALLARRAY(10) = ' '

And what of the fixed format equivalent definitions:

01 D AllArray DS 02 D Array 2 dim(10) 03 D Var1 S 20 04 D i S 2 0

As I have shown even though the MOVEA is gone it is simple to do the same in modern RPG.

 

This article was written for IBM i 7.3, and should work for earlier releases too.