This morning my nerdish IBM-i Chum Toby, pinged me a whatsapp challenge to write a little RPG code snippet to “extract invoice numbers” from a random string of data. So…. if you had a string ‘INV#10563592 DATED 12/17/19 SO#286045 NOT GOING’ and you knew that this is a shitty text file way of referencing an

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Want to learn IBM RDi? Wondering where to go to find all those old RDi articles that used to be on IBM’s Developerworks website? Googling, Binging and Duck Duck Going, frantically searching for help with RDi? Back in October 2019, IBM announced they were killing the Developerworks website: “As part of the overall IBM effort

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Some of IBM’s error messages are more cryptic than others. Copying files from the IFS using CPYFRMIMPF sometimes spits out error messages which are less than clear: CPYFRMIMPF FRMSTMF(‘/FOLDER/FOLDER/FILE’) TOFILE(*LIBL/FILENAME) MBROPT(REPLACE) RCDDLM(LF) STRDLM(NONE) RMVBLANK(NONE)FLDDLM(TAB) ERRRCDOPT(REPLACE) RPLNULLVAL(FLDDFT) File system error occurred. Error number 3021Copy command ended because of error. Internet Search for CPYFRMIMPF 3021 shows nothing!

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Colleague asked me this question just a minute ago – as he said “its obvious when you know how but not when you dont” Simply use the IBM i RNM command: Personally, I find this command syntax a little annoying: fully qualifying the FROM string and then just using the unqualified NEW file name in

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AKA – How to copy IBM i IFS folder and all subfolders and documents to a new Location I just upgraded a clients PRESTO Server to the current version 8.1 What is Presto? It’s commonly called an IBM i Modernization Application : Essentially transforming the old fashioned AS400 style Green Screen terminals to modern Webstyle

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So, I just did an upgrade of the BCD Software GUI Client (now owned by Fresche Legacy by the way) for a client. This upgraded their older version of Presto to PRESTO 8.1 Server. This also comes with a new Presto Client and Screen Designer adding some nice new tweaks. Compulsive Library Naming Tendencies The

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TURNOVER and IBM i ASP (Auxiliary Storage Pools) Unicom (who bought out ‘Softlanding Systems’) recommends upgrading to TURNOVER V101 before implementing iASP technology. It recommends it because it only works on V101 😉 The main thing to remember is that you need to set your job, or session, to use the iASP before going into

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IBM i iASP (Independent Auxiliary Storage Pool) The independent auxiliary storage pool (IASP) is the strategic building block for availability on IBM i. There is a lot of mythology around migrating to an IASP environment, and some extremely wild estimates about the complexity of migrating. The reality is usually considerably easier than most people would

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By default, the IFS lives in the *SYSBASE ASP. But, we can move the IFS Directories, and all documents therein, to the iASP location easily: Let’s assume your ASP is called ‘my_iasp’ 1) Vary on iASP 2) Create your new directory on the iASP, if it doesn’t already exist 3) Move the directory, and all

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An interesting question was lobbed at me this morning – “How can I change the data change timestamp in an ifs file?” One of the good folks over at Tire Rack (the software developers, not the blokes that change the tires) asked if I knew a way to update the timestamp for the data changed

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Data Area (*DTAARA) using IBM i SQL Our first problem is, SQL doesn’t know what a *DTAARA is. SQL reads data from Tables but our gloriously quirky IBM i Box has other places to secretly store data. Data Areas are just one of these tricky little blocks of data that other machines don’t know about

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Last night was I was chatting to an old programming chum in Chicago. As you may be aware, for most people in the AS400/iSeries/IBM-i arena the term “old programming chum” automatically implies a gray haired old fart wearing frayed cords, cheap (but comfortable!) shoes and excessively dour facial features with a slightly “smarter than thou”

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