Writing new records is a standard task in any system, and this article makes one of the steps of that process a whole lot easier.

Written by Joe Pluta

One of the most critical functions of any business application is writing data to the database, which not coincidentally is one of the things that RPG does best. The whole concept of an externally described file is incredibly powerful: the ability to store data in individual fields and leave the aggregation to the compiler makes data generation a quick and simple task. However, even good techniques can still get better, and in this article, I'll show how a couple of keywords can be combined in a way that can shave precious time off of your development.

Create a PDF "Hello World" program with RPG.

Written by Tom Snyder

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from the MC Press book Advanced Integrated RPG.

I hope you enjoyed my Video Tour presented on July 21 in which I discussed the possibilities of using Java with RPG to send email and to create Excel spreadsheets and PDFs. This article contains condensed excerpts from my book that will show you how to install the iText open-source project, which can be used to create PDFs right from within RPG.

Out of the box, RDPi makes programming faster. Now let me show you what happens when you make a few tweaks under the hood to make your editor fly!

Written by Joe Pluta

RDPi is an incredible tool. Whether it's something new like the Screen and Report Designers or something as standard as the LPEX editor, there's almost no part of programming where RDPi won't make your life a little easier. And that's just from day one after installing the tool. However, as powerful as RDPi is, it still has room for some personalization, the kind of tweaks that can make the tool as comfortable as your favorite chair.

Turn conceptual Java properties into definitive, concrete attributes.

Written by Tom Snyder

When working with RPG in different environments, such as production and test, you will most likely be working with different library lists and using different versions of programs and files. To provide a sanity check for yourself, you will want to ensure that you're using the correct programs and files by validating the objects that are being used by the job. This article shows you some methods that I use to verify similar Java attributes when using Java with RPG, such as the currently running version of JVM and the class path that is being used.

Some jobs are too tricky to leave to your computer unsupervised, but RDPi has tools that speed up even the most tedious of programming tasks.

Written by Joe Pluta

A computer will do exactly what you tell it to do, no matter how much that request might defy common sense. A perfect example of that truism is the ubiquitous and sometimes dangerous "find and replace." You can tell any decent source-editing tool to replace all instances of the field name CUSNAM with CUSNME and it will dutifully do exactly that, and thanks to the cryptic nature of field names in RPG, the chances are that the execution will be flawless. However, use find and replace enough and you will eventually run into a situation where the editor replaces things you really didn't want replaced. This article shows you how to combine a couple of features of Rational Developer for Power Systems Software for IBM i (RDPi) to create a semi-automated find and replace mechanism.

Achieve API invocation performance gains and discover a new pointer caching technique.

Written by Junlei Li

The System Entry Point Table (SEPT) object, QSYS/QINSEPT, is a space object with MI object type/subtype code hex 19C3 and external object type *SEPT. It is designed to improve the performance of invocation of program objects in library QSYS. The SEPT stores authorized system pointers to many (but not all) of the user domain/system state (aka API) or system domain/system state program objects residing in library QSYS in its associated space.

The real power of procedures is revealed in this article through the use of parameters and return values.

Written by Joe Pluta

This is the last article in this series on Prototyping for Productivity. This is where I finally put all the pieces together and remove a third of the code in my little sample program. More impressive, though, is that, through the magic of D-specs, I turn 13 executable lines of code into four. While there just wasn't much code in this particular program to remove, in a real production application, the amount of code removed can be significant. Not only that, it's the type of repetitive code (validation, formatting, etc.) that is naturally prone to typographic errors—the kind that compile but cause errors.

Do you know all the kinds of pointers and understand what they do?

Written by Junlei Li

In i5/OS, machine interface (MI) pointers are used to represent many things:

• Objects and the data within objects
• Run-time primitives, such as program or procedure invocation
• Suspend point and resume point in an invocation
• Procedures of a module object
• Locations within an OPM program or a procedure of an ILE module object that the control flow can be branched to
• And so on