Jon Paris and Susan Gantner

My series of three Guru tips on the free iSphere plug-in first appeared in 2015. Since I still find that most RDi users haven’t heard of it, I’ve decided to repeat the series as Guru Classics. I’ve made a few updates to this first one in the series…

This gem of a BIF was introduced with the V7.1 release and so was not available some five years ago when I wrote my original Bevy series of tips. Now that most active development shops are running V7.1 and later it seems a good candidate for a…

Instead of discussing new RPG features, we thought we'd focus instead on describing an approach to a problem that many of you will have encountered in one form or another. As is often the case, this piece was "inspired" by a question on an IBM i…

This is my third tip on using RDi’s Code Coverage support. In the first tip, we explored setting up a test run using Service Entry Points (a.k.a. SEPs). In the second one, I covered how to create a configuration for the test run. Here we’ll see how…

We have written about some of the big enhancements to RDi that have come during the 9.6 release of RDi, such as hover and annotation enhancements and the massive changes to the Object Table. We even created a video of a few of our favorite 9.6…

We have written about some of the big enhancements to RDi that have come during the 9.6 release of RDi, such as hover and annotation enhancements and the massive changes to the Object Table. We even created a video of a few of our favorite 9.6…

Every year at about this time, IBM usually delivers a Technology Refresh (TR). Usually with that TR comes new RPG features. This fall is no exception and RPG has delivered three new features, two of which are "biggies." The first is procedure…

We first wrote about variable length fields back in 2002. We decided this is a good time to revisit this topic for a number of reasons: As more and more people make use of SQL to define their tables, we see a corresponding increase in the usage of…

Remember the bad old days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the only way to build strings in RPG involved playing silly games with arrays? Or worse still, obscure combinations of MOVE operations? Thankfully those days are far behind us —…

I wrote the original version of this tip a few years ago but I still find a lot of RPGers aren’t using keyboard shortcuts as much as I think they should be. Since shortcuts can make you so much more productive, I’m re-visiting this topic with a few…

My last Guru tip provided an introduction to RDi’s Code Coverage tool that you can use to determine how complete your tests are. In that tip I discussed how to run it using Service Entry Points (SEPs). In this follow-on tip, I’ll continue the…

When you’ve made changes to one or more programs, you test all the changes – right? And, of course, you also test all the rest of the code just to make sure you didn’t break anything else. Did you do that with your last set of changes? Did you test…

The history of indicators pre-dates even the earliest versions of RPG and takes us all the way back to the old tabulating machines, perhaps even earlier depending on how broad a definition one uses. What is without doubt, though, is that indicators…

When using RDi for editing my CL, DDS, RPG, or COBOL code, I find that I can save a lot of time by using keyboard shortcuts for functions that would otherwise require that I take my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. So I thought I would share…

Print It’s Christmas in springtime for RPGers. Whenever we have a new release of RPG there is always something of a Christmas-like anticipation of just what Santa Barbara** has brought us this time. We don't know exactly what it will be, but we're…

A commonly asked question by RDi newbies is: “How do I view source in split screen like I can in SEU?” The answer is that you can’t do it exactly like SEU, but then why would you want to? The RDi editor offers far greater flexibility. The original…

Every time I teach some of the more recent additions to RPG, such as XML parsing or Open Access, I find that I need to include some “remedial” education on some of the data definition enhancements that have been made to the language over recent…

As I’m sure you know by now, IBM recently announced version 7.4 of IBM i. Along with major enhancements such as Db2 Mirror, we also got a number of new RPG features. In this tip I’ll cover those that are already available in 7.3 via PTF. The 7.4-only…

I recently wrote a tip on using an Open Access handler to enable the creation of flat files in the IFS. In that version of the handler I generated a generic file name and used hard-coded record delimiters and code page settings. I mentioned at the…

Q: XML-INTO helped me with processing XML data, but now I’m being asked to process JSON, CSVs and other types of data. Can RPG help me to do this? Everyone knows about RPG’s flexibility of interface when it comes to accessing Db2* for i data. But…