How to use IBMi External Procedures in TURNOVER with *LIBL or specific library

IBM i

May 25

Turnover (the one written by Softlanding that does Change Management, not the one that is full of apple and tastes delicious) is a pretty cool Software Change Management application native to IBMi. But of course, you already knew that.

But, did you know that you can promote an EXTERNAL PROCEDURE to a specific library and then have it invoke its program component from that library, or from any library that you care to define to Turnover or of course from the *LIBL?

It’s all down to these basic rules:

  • &LIBRARY is the variable that TURNOVER will replace with the name of your target library during promotion
  • if you quote the procedure name (ie: ‘program’) then it must have either a hardcoded library (‘QGPL/THING’) or the variable (‘&LIBRARY/THING)
  • If not quotes (ie: EXTERNAL NAME THING) then *LIBL will be used to call the THING program

Example *EXTPRC using &LIBRARY VARIABLE:

CREATE PROCEDURE CHKCASACT

(OUT ACCOUNTNUM9 DEC(9,0),
IN BIRTHDATE DEC(6,0),
IN DRIVERSLIC CHAR(25),
IN DRIVERSLICSTATE CHAR(2),
IN PASSPORTID CHAR(20),
IN OTHERID CHAR(30),
IN RZIPCODE CHAR(15),
IN LASTNAME CHAR(25),
IN FIRSTNAME CHAR(25),
IN RADDRESS1 CHAR(25),
OUT RETURN_CODE CHAR(25),
OUT RETURN_MSG CHAR(100))
DYNAMIC RESULT SETS 2
LANGUAGE RPGLE
SPECIFIC CHKCASACT
NOT DETERMINISTIC
MODIFIES SQL DATA
CALLED ON NULL
INPUT EXTERNAL NAME ‘&LIBRARY/CHKCASACT’
PARAMETER STYLE GENERAL ;

And of course to change that external name to :

EXTERNAL NAME CHKCASACT

will result in it calling it from the *LIBL

It took me a lot of head scratching to figure it out… and YES…. I know I probably could have just opened a manual and found that out. 🙂

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About the Author

IBM i Software Developer, Digital Dad, AS400 Anarchist, RPG Modernizer, Alpha Nerd and Passionate Eater of Cheese and Biscuits. Nick Litten Dot Com is a mixture of blog posts that can be sometimes serious, frequently playful and probably down-right pointless all in the space of a day. Enjoy your stay, feel free to comment and in the words of the most interesting man in the world: Stay thirsty my friend.

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