Use SQL to read lots of rows (records) into a data structure (array)

Us IBM i blokes love reading things from files. Hashtag internet fact. But sometimes we just want to read a certain number of records, or rows in SQL speak. For example, when building a page by page subfile with say 15 lines per page, we might want to be able to read an entire file, but read it in 15 row chunks. In native IO style RPG, we would probably set a counter and increment it by one for each row read, stopping at 15. But using SQL for IO it does all that counting for us  🙂

This means that in most cases we can just wrap the read a DOW loop and fetch until the cows come home i.e. nothing more to fetch.

Lets look at a quick and dirty example reading 15 rows at a time into a data structure with 15 elements.

Using SQL for Single Page Subfiles

 // read the items 
runsql 
 FETCH from (someIncrediblyInterestingFile)
 For 15 rows 
 into :data_structure
 
 // now write the sfl1 recs 
 for x1 = 1 to 15; 
   %occur(data_structure) = x1; --> this is for MODS 
   ... do stuff with the data_structure fields
 endFor;