Jon Paris and Susan Gantner

When I re-read this tip while looking for a “Classic” candidate, I was reminded that the underlying issue it addresses, namely how data is actually stored in an RPG program, is one that many RPG programmers don’t really have a firm grip on. That…

This Guru Classic tip is my third in a series exploring the iSphere RDi plug-in. In this tip I’ll cover two additional ways in which iSphere expands the RDi toolset. There are a few details that I’ve updated in this new version of the tip due to…

In this tip I’m going to address a question that arises regularly on RPG-oriented Internet lists, namely: “Is there an easy way to convert a character string to its hexadecimal equivalent?” One answer, of course, would be to write your own routine…

In my previous tip I returned to the “Bevy” series to tell you about the latest addition to the family: %ScanRpl. Shortly after completing that tip I realized that there have been a number of more recent BIFs such as %SubArr and some enhancements to…

In my last Guru Classic tip I introduced you to the iSphere RDi plug-in. In this tip I’ll cover a few other features in iSphere that I find very useful. This time I’ll focus on a couple of options there that can help you search for things and…

Not Bad For A "Dead" Language For many years now, we've been hearing that "RPG is dead" and "IBM isn't enhancing it anymore", and on and on. The first time we heard the "dead" comment put forward with any conviction was back in the 1980s and it has…

RDi V9.6 seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. I started this series about this release of RDi almost two years ago. You may have thought my last (fifth) tip in the series was the last on this subject, but it turns out there’s still more! I…

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…

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…