Jon Paris and Susan Gantner

IBM i Consultants, Developers, Educators and Apostles

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RDi V9.6

May 18, 2020

Guru: RDi V9.6, Part 8 – Better Ways To Copy Members, Manage LIBLs, and Find Preferences

If my crystal ball had told me just how many RDi V9.6 fix packs there would be and, more importantly, how many great new features would be added, I might have thought differently about starting a numbered series! Looks like I may well make it into…

May 11, 2020

Guru: RDi V9.6 Part 7 – Zoom in, Know Where You Are, Refactor Constants and More

RDi enhancements just keep coming. Since my last installment in this series on V9.6 there have been more fix packs and quite a few new features. Here in part 7 I’ll cover refactoring character constants, two ways for RDi to indicate “you are here”,…

Apr 6, 2020

DATA-INTO Plus DATA-GEN for Web Services

Generating and Consuming JSON with RPG Of course, one could always do it the hard way, i.e. stringing together requests and parsing responses "by hand". However, RPG gives us three main alternatives to this: Embed SQL and use its JSON…

Apr 6, 2020

DATA-INTO Plus DATA-GEN for Web Services

Generating and Consuming JSON with RPG Of course, one could always do it the hard way, i.e. stringing together requests and parsing responses "by hand". However, RPG gives us three main alternatives to this: Embed SQL and use its JSON…

Mar 4, 2020

Guru Classic: Overlaid Packed Data In Data Structures

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…

Mar 4, 2020

Guru Classic: More iSphere Goodies

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…

Mar 2, 2020

Guru: Practicing Safe Hex in RPG

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…

Feb 5, 2020

Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs — Updates

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…

Feb 5, 2020

Guru Classic: Looking For Stuff With iSphere

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…

Feb 3, 2020

Celebrating 10 More Years of RPG Progress

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…

Jan 20, 2020

Guru: RDi V9.6, Part 6 – The New Object Table Gets Even Better

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…

Jan 8, 2020

Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs – %ScanRpl (Scan And Replace)

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…

Jan 8, 2020

Guru Classic: iSphere Plug-in Expands RSE/RDi Toolset

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…

Dec 16, 2019

Tackling Unique Audit Requirements with RPG

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…

Nov 25, 2019

Guru: Code Coverage via CL Command

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…

Nov 8, 2019

Little Things Mean a Lot in RDi 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…

Nov 8, 2019

Little Things Mean a Lot in RDi 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…

Oct 14, 2019

RPG's New Procedure Overloading and DATA-GEN Capabilities

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…

Sep 16, 2019

An Introduction to Variable Field Lengths in RPG

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…

Aug 14, 2019

Guru Classic: The Efficiency of Varying Length Character Variables

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 —…