Part 1 investigated message queues and types of messages. Now we'll look at the CL commands that send messages.
Written by Jim Buck, Bryan Meyers, and Dan Riehl
Editor's note: This article is an excerpt from Chapter 16, "Advanced Message Handling," of Control Language Programming for IBM i. See Part 1 here.
Four major CL commands are used to send messages:
Messages serve many purposes: to provide information, to ask a question and request a reply, and to solicit some action on the recipient's part.
Written by Jim Buck, Bryan Meyers, and Dan Riehl
Editor's note: This article is an excerpt from Chapter 16, "Advanced Message Handling," of Control Language Programming for IBM i.
Understanding how messages work is an important part of writing good CL programs. In fact, without at least a basic understanding of messages, your CL programs will be error-prone and, in many cases, unreliable.
IBM i is driven by messages. Messages are used for a multitude of different purposes, including initiating jobs, executing commands, communicating between programs, signaling error conditions, letting users communicate with each other, and letting jobs communicate with users.
Over the past 20 years, ILE for RPG has gone from being something new and startling to being almost legacy. Lots of us are now using RPG ILE concepts on a regular basis. But what about CL? Can it be ILE too?
Written by David Shirey
Everyone knows about ILE for RPG.
Or at least everyone knows how to spell it, and a lot of people have adopted ILE practices as part of their regular routine. But I don't think the same can be said for CL. While most of us are now doing our programs in QRPGLESRC versus QRPGSRC, how many of those same people are still using QCLSRC for their Command Language source? My guess is quite a few.
Let's review of some of the SQL functions available.
Written by Bruce Vining
In the February 2015 CL Corner, A More Flexible Interface to the RUNSQL CL Command, we saw how to create a command of our own, CRTSQLVIEW, to create views by utilizing some of the built-in functions provided by the SQL language. The CRTSQLVIEW command removed the need for us to write a custom program per view (which was covered in the January 2015 article Enhancing WRKQRY Reports the Easy Way. These previous articles used the SQL built-in functions of VarChar and DayName to return the mixed-case name of the day for a date field. This month, using CRTSQLVIEW, we'll be looking at additional built-ins that are available to you.
In this article, we'll building the SQL request dynamically.
Written by Bruce Vining
In the January 2015 CL Corner, Enhancing WRKQRY Reports the Easy Way, we saw how to create an SQL view for use by WRKQRY using the Run SQL (RUNSQL) CL command. I received quite a few notes asking, among other things, for an example of how to build the RUNSQL SQL parameter using variables rather than the static approach taken in the previous article. So today we'll look at what's required to build the SQL parameter using variables/parameters. For demonstration purposes, we'll continue to use the PROJECTS file that was introduced in the previous article.
Let's look more uses of the RUNSQL CL command.
Written by Bruce Vining
I recently received a note asking if there was a way to add the day of week to query reports generated by the IBM Query for i (5770-QU1) product. That is, take a current report containing dates as shown below:
Create your own utility to lock what the Allocate Object (ALCOBJ) command does not allow you to lock.
Written by Junlei Li
The Allocate Object (ALCOBJ) command is used to acquire one or more lock states on each of a list of objects. The lock states are allocated to the requesting thread, its containing job (i.e., MI process), or a lock space (i.e., an MI transaction control structure (TCS) object). Generally, the ALCOBJ command and its partner, the Deallocate Object (DLCOBJ) command, can achieve tasks similar to the Lock Object (LOCK) and Unlock Object (UNLOCK) MI instructions. But not exactly.
Let's take a look at using logical variables.
Written by Bruce Vining
Recently, on TechTarget's IT Knowledge Exchange site, SundarNVS entered the following request:
"Hi! I have an iSeries [sic] database table that has a column name JOBQ. I want to update all records with JOBQ value QBATCH into 2 different jobq names for alternate records. I'm a CL programmer and looking for an example of updating a column via SQL that I can call from my CL in a loop."
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