Jon Paris and Susan Gantner

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…

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…

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…

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…

Author’s Note: I’m revisiting this classic tip since the original was written back in 2009, long before the introduction of free-form data declarations. In addition, I’ve updated this tip to point to the new %SCANRPL BIF, which impacts this scenario.…

In my earlier tip I described how to create a custom perspective and I also described one scenario when custom perspectives come in handy. I promised to follow that up with another way to use custom perspectives. I’m often asked questions such…

Print Not long ago, walking into an IBM i development shop meant seeing a sea of green code on black backgrounds. These days, green screens for coders are a vanishing breed. In more and more shops, Rational* Developer for IBM i (RDi) is rapidly…

I often talk to people who are confused about RDi perspectives, so I thought this two-part series on why and how to create and use your own custom perspectives would be a good one to update. Very little has changed since the original publication of…

Author’s Note: The reason I chose this particular tip to revisit was that a similar question came up on one of the RPG web forums the other day. The questioner was looking for an easy way to edit a numeric field to include the use of colons as…

Recently I came upon a couple of questions on internet lists asking for an easy method to create flat files in the IFS. Not CSV files, but rather simple text files where individual data items are in fixed character positions. Various somewhat…

Author’s Note: This tip was first published in August 2008. One thing that has changed in the intervening 10-plus years is that I find a lot more RPGers regularly using subprocedures now. Something that hasn’t really changed much is that many of…