Let’s play with RDi and CL!

I was happily editing some CLP code in RDi and very pleased with the Rational Developers automatic code reformatting: stretching out my Control Language code to fit the screen neatly. This is a nice enhancement to the code editing experience and blows the trusty old SEU workhorse out of the water….

I like how it stretches my code out beyond the 80 columns of SEU… until I try to look at it using SEU and then realize it’s chopped off the end. But it looks OK in RDi… but chopped in SEU… #aaargh

Here’s what it looks like in RDi:

But in SEU it’s chopped off:

Luckily RDi has a nice easy solution, which lets us overcome this limitation of the Stone-age Editing Utility.

Setting column widths in RDi

Windows > Preferences > Remote Systems > Remote Systems LPEX Editor > IBM i Parsers > CL

So lets do some tweaking!

I played with it and like these settings the best:

• Automatic Uppercasing *OFF
• Automatic Indent – Blanks 3
• Automatic formatting
•   Label Position 1
•   Command Position 5
•   Continued Line Indent 14
• Line Length 100 (I prefer it longer but this solves my problem with Turnover #CestLaVie)
• Label above command

For today at least 🙂

Now I can just run down the source typing a space (into a space) so it’s flagged as changed and the RDi parser re-sorts and aligns the code for me. In this case ending up like this:

Neat code in a Jiffy.

HINT: if you make layout changes they are only applied when a line is changed. So, do a SELECT ALL (CTRL/A) and then a CUT/PASTE on the entire source member you will immediately see the code in the new reformatted layout 🙂