After measuring 12,000 projects, a leading researcher reveals his findings.

Written by Steve Kilner

Maintenance and enhancement projects for legacy systems are notorious for being budget busters and deadline killers. This article gives a quick overview of how you can significantly improve the success rate of such projects. For more information, you can also watch these short videos: Using Complexity Analysis to Lower Project Costs and Hyper-Navigation of RPG Systems.

Manipulate and protect data quickly and easily.

Written by Issak Brender

There are many ways in modern RPG/RPGLE to manipulate data: BIFs, data structures, whole programs. This TechTip demonstrates examples of character string manipulations with XLATE operation code.

Replacing values has gotten a whole lot easier!

Written by Steve Pitcher

The new RPG IV built-in function %SCANRPL gives you the ability to scan a string for a value and then replace all occurrences with another value. The first parameter is the string you want to search for within another string. The second parameter is the string you want to replace it with. The third parameter is the string you want to scan. Simple.

Database update collisions are a common problem, and qualified data structures provide an easy solution.

Written by Joe Pluta

Database update collisions have been around since the advent of interactive database maintenance. First, we had no record locks. That left us with "last Enter key wins." Let's say I edit a record and you update the same record at the same time. We key in conflicting changes and press Enter. If I hit Enter first, my change is written to the database first; then your Enter is processed, and your change overwrites my change. Last Enter key wins!

We continue our quest to create an RPG program that "talks" to your PC application.

Written by Rafael Victoria-Pereira

In a previous tip in this series, I described how to use ADO to call an RPG program from a VB application. Now, I'll detail the fundamental aspects of that RPG program. First, a quick recap: in our scenario, there's a VB application that requires data about a client's debt status. This data resides on a System i within the same network. The data cannot be retrieved via a simple query because a set of business rules is associated with it (the part about the debt limit for the client). The VB application is calling the RPG program via ADO, using a list of parameters (see the table in the previous article).

Let's wrap up our three-part FTP series by performing an import.

Written by Rafael Victoria-Pereira

In part 1 of this TechTip series, I explained how to automate FTP transfers. In part 2, I showed how to use the procedure in a real-life situation. Now, part 3 will focus on how to import a text file into a physical file.

i talk to other servers. No, it's not a typo. This TechTip series will get your System i talking to other servers.

Written by Rafael Victoria-Pereira

Back in the old days, when our server was called AS/400, there were few or even no "satellite systems" like PC servers that needed to pass and/or receive data from it. Nowadays, it's a totally different landscape: the i sits together with a broad scope of servers and devices with which it has to communicate, passing and receiving data. These interfaces are, at times, manual data imports or exports performed by operators via boring and repetitive procedures.

UDATE may not be the right way to get the current date, but old habits are hard to break.

Written by Sam Lennon

When you need to put a date and a time together in your RPG IV program, be sure you understand how to use UDATE, *DATE, the TIME opcode , %DATE, %TIME, and %TIMESTAMP.