Why doesnt SEU let me enter the HANDLER keyword to my F-SPECS in RPG?
Because, SEU is a code editing program that was designed decades ago (it sounds *really* old if you say it like that) and isn’t aware of any of the newer RPGLE operation codes.
You have two basic solutions:
- Use a modern IDE to edit your source (IBM Rational Developer, Websphere Developer, RPG NextGen, RPG Alive or choose any other of the many solutions out there)
- Stick with SEU but learn to work around its limitations 🙂
Personally I tend to use RDi for most of my IBM i coding. Now saying that, I also love SEU. I used this for many years and still have a soft spot for its excellent search/replace utilities and it lets me do something quicker.
So, how do I enter modern RPG opcodes using SEU?
Let’s go through an example of updating an existing RPGLE source member to add the Handler code for Profound Logic‘s screen handler routine.
When you try to manually type the HANDLER keyword against the DSPF you will note that SEU immediately complains “The keyword is not recognized; keyword is ignored.” This is because SEU syntax checking is frozen at the 6.1 level for RPG. IBM is no longer providing updates. This means that SEU does not recognize the HANDLER keyword as valid.
But, it is a valid keyword so we can just ignore the SEU syntax warning when entering this new keyword and compile as normal.
The simple way to save the source is to use the SAVE command in SEU==> command box
type “SAVE” it will tell you “Syntax errors exist. Press Enter to save.” just press again to update the source code
Alternatively you could exit the source with F3 and then change the Change/create member parm to “Y” and the “Return to editing” to “N”
Horses for courses.