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Would you like some SQL with your CL?

bruce_viningWritten by Bruce Vining

It would appear that thank-you cards to family members of the IBM CL SQL development teams might be in order as these IBM developers seem to be putting in lots of overtime—and not getting home very often.

 

Last month, in "New Support for CL Commands Lets You Know When a Command Ends," we reviewed how IBM has provided PTFs to V5R4, 6.1, and 7.1, allowing an exit program to be called when the command processing program (CPP) of a CL command completes. IBM is now providing new CL support for SQL as part of the next DB2 PTF groups. The planned availability for 6.1 is May 4 and for 7.1 is May 11. These PTFs provide a new CL command: Run SQL (RUNSQL).

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Need to know when "something" has finished? The Command Analyzer Retrieve exit point capability tells you what you need to know.

bruce_viningWritten by Bruce Vining

This month, I had planned on looking at the DDS details of implementing the message subfile (record formats MSGSFL and MSGSFLCTL) used in last month's article, "Letting the User Know What's Right and Wrong." I am, however, going to defer that discussion due to an IBM CL command enhancement that became available just last week.

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Learn how to execute commands in batch using SBMJOB in this excerpt from the MC Press book Control Language Programming for IBM i.

jim_buckWritten by Jim Buck, Bryan Myers, and Dan Riehl

The SBMJOB (Submit Job) CL command lets you submit a batch job to a job queue. This command has many parameters, but in its simplest form it is expressed as follows:

 

SBMJOB CMD(CL-command)

 

Once you have submitted a batch job, you are allowed little or no interaction with the job. For example, a batch job normally does not display a screen on your workstation and wait for your input. You can, however, monitor the progress of your batch job using the WRKSBMJOB (Work with Submitted Jobs) command. Batch processing typically is used for long-running jobs that require no workstation input, such as those that produce printed reports or process many transactions. A batch job is entirely separate from the job that submitted it, with its own call stack and its own main storage requirements.

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Use a message subfile to return error information to the user.

bruce_viningWritten by Bruce Vining

Anyone who has been following this column for a while probably knows that I believe in using messages whenever possible. Messages are a wonderful way of keeping textual information out of my code, thereby allowing me to reword some text without having to change an application program, a command definition, and so on. One place where I find that many developers (CL and otherwise) are underutilizing messages is in the area of display file error-reporting.

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Extracting a bit can be done a number of ways, but the code in this article uses only the basic arithmetic capabilities of CL.

joe_plutaWritten by Joe Pluta

This article is sort of the antithesis of what we normally do in RPG Developer. Sometimes, you need to do things in CL without calling an RPG program. The situation is rare, but it happens. One case may be where you have to provide the source to the program in question but you can't count on the RPG compiler being there. And no matter how much IBM has improved the language (and it's been quite a bit), some things really can't be done in CL. But in this article, I want to show you how to do something in CL you may have thought was not possible: extract the value of a single bit.

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Let's look at some additional stat APIs.

bruce_viningWritten by Bruce Vining

In last month's column, "Dependency and Validity-Checking of Command Parameters," we looked at how a validity-checking program could be used to detect the use of conflicting parameter values when running the USEDIRPGM command. It had been my intent for this month's column to continue that discussion of validity-checking programs. However, some readers of this column have encountered a problem with the USEDIRPGM command processing program (CPP), so I'm moving up a topic that I had not planned on discussing for a while yet.

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Today, we extend the USEDIRPGM command.

bruce_viningWritten by Bruce Vining

In last month's column, "Clearing, Rather than Deleting, an IFS File," we implemented a CLRSTMF command. Today, we will start to incorporate this command into the USEDIRPGM command that we created earlier in the year.

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Here's the command IBM should have given you but didn't.

bruce_viningWritten by Bruce Vining

In recent articles, starting with "Trying to Get a Handle on Your IFS?," we've seen how to automate the deletion of an IFS stream file when a file has not been used within a user-determined number of days. Rather than deleting a stream file, though, some companies would prefer to clear a stream file—similar to how the Clear Physical File Member (CLRPFM) command can be used to clear a database file member. Unfortunately, if you were to prompt generically for all commands that start with the letters CLR (that is, prompt for CLR*), you would find that there is not a Clear File (CLRF) or Clear Stream File (CLRSTMF) command on your system—or at least not one provided by the i operating system. For this reason, today's article will look at how to implement a CLRSTMF CL command.

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