RDP Plug-ins

As you know, we’re big fans of RSE and its related tools found originally in WDSC and more recently in RDP. There are many, many features that come in that toolset directly from IBM—so many that we keep learning new ones all the time. But as many things as are there, there is still a long list of nice-to-have features that aren’t there. We published a wish list some time ago about some of the additions we’d like to see. Some of these have since become available and many more are on IBM’s RFE (Request For Enhancement) list.

The fact that these tools are built on Eclipse means that it’s not always necessary to wait for IBM to implement a feature. Eclipse was built from the ground up to allow developers to plug their own features directly into the toolset. Fortunately, many people have done just that. More fortunately still, many of these plug-ins are available for free.

We want to share just a few examples of some of the plug-ins with some specific IBM i functionality that we are aware of. We haven’t personally tried many of these plug-ins yet, but perhaps some of you have. If so, we hope you’ll let us know (via the comments) how you like them. Also please let us know about plug-ins that we’ve missed. We’re sure there are many more out there. Please help us add to the list.

Many software companies have plug-ins that interface to their (usually) host-based software. Examples of these include many of the source control or change management products, such as those from Arcad, PTC (formerly MKS), Aldon and SoftLanding. In addition, there are plug-ins that interface to tools such as DBU from ProData and Surveyor from Linoma and probably many more. If you use the corresponding software on the host, these plug-ins can provide a great way to integrate your editing environment with that software.

For our purposes here, we’re interested more in tools that are more generic in nature that don’t require other software (other than RDP or WDSC, of course) to be installed to make use of them.

Are you frustrated by the limitations of RDP’s Templates and Snippets? Someone on the WDSC-L list on Midrange.com was and developed a plug-in with much more robust template functionality called FreeMarker. If this sounds interesting to you, visit this site for more information or to download that tool.

Several other people on the same list use the QuantumDB plug-in for database access. It is not written specifically for IBM i but does work with DB2 for i. For more information, see this site.

We mentioned Arcad Software’s tools related to their products above. They also offer some generic tools for RSE users that do not relate to nor require installation of their products. They have a 5250 emulator plug-in. And their latest tool is a Data Area Editor plug-in. You can get more information and fill in a request for download of these free tools here.

SoftLanding also offers a generic set of tools called RSE Extensions Plug-in. It offers several utilities, including a spooled file viewer (it was created before RDP had its own and still has some advantages over the “native” one), a message queue monitor, a Data Area editor and tool to display Data Queues. You can get more information and download the tool here. We noticed that the website says the latest version is verified through RDP 8.0, so if, like us, you’re already on 8.5, you may want to check around, perhaps on the Midrange list archives, to see if others have experience with it at that level.

The newest set of plug-ins for RDP that we’ve seen is from Germany. There are two plug-ins from Task Force IT Consulting GmbH. One is a version of the TN5250J Emulator that lets you run an emulation session within the workbench. The other is a set of tools called iSphere. iSphere contains a Message File Editor, a Binding Directory Editor and a Compare/Merge Editor for source members.

We’ve just installed iSphere and we’ll be reporting on our progress with using it in our next EXTRA article, which will be available in two weeks. So if that one sounds interesting to you, take a look out for that. You can subscribe to the free IBM i EXTRA newsletter here. If you don’t want to wait for that and want to try out iSphere for yourself, take a look at it here.

 

 

 

Happy Endings

We're writing this on the plane flying from Stockholm to Heathrow en-route to a brief stopover at home before we head to Minneapolis for the upcoming RPG & DB2 Summit.

Our friends at Data3 did a wonderful job and the event was very successful with more than 100 of the faithful gathered together to hear about the "latest and greatest" in all things IBM i. The location was beautiful too - just outside the downtown core right alongside the channel into the main harbor. In fact one of the sights at the hotel is to watch the daily arrival and departure of the large and very modern ferries, which the locals affectionately refer to as the "booze cruise." Two or three of these leave Stockholm each day and make the overnight run to Finland or sometimes, apparently, simply into the nautical equivalent of no-man's land. Why? Because Sweden has very high taxes on liquor and apparently these cruises take long enough for you to qualify for a substantial duty-free allowance. As our friends Trevor Perry and Alison Butterill noted, this accounts for the people getting off what appears to be a cruise liner carrying only tiny overnight bags--and very large bags of duty-free items!

But telling you how lucky we were to have been teaching in such a gorgeous location was not intended to be the point of this blog. Instead we wanted to pass on a story related to us by our hosts of one Swedish company's successful approach to the problem of finding new RPG blood. Like many of our customers, the company faced an aging RPG population. While some of their work is outsourced, the organization felt the need to have a strong in-house core to the development team. The solution was to hire recent computer studies graduates and have them trained in RPG. Those of you who read our blog regularly will know that this is an approach we have long advocated, and we have been involved in several such programs. It was encouraging, therefore, to see others successfully using this approach. The training consisted of a three-week classroom period, followed by four weeks of practical hands-on experience and then an additional week in the classroom. Needless to say, crucial to this effort to persuade these new hires that RPG did not mean "Role Playing Game" was the use of modern tools like RDP--no green-screen chains for these newcomers!

If you can read Swedish you can find the details in Data3's excellent magazine. We tried Google translate but it just isn't good enough to publish in that form. So, we hope to work with our friends at Data3 to produce an English version, which with luck we can share with you in next month's IBM i EXTRA eNewsletter.

It is nice to hear a story with a happy ending! But Jon will probably never persuade Susan that herring  is a real delicacy worth exploring.

Show Us the Comments on “Show Me the Data!”

In “QUILNGTX: Show Me the Data!” we shared a new way to display text that removed the barrier of 52-character text limit. And we encouraged you to keep playing with it and share other ways you’ve used the APIs. Here’s your outlet. Please use the comments section below to share and discuss ideas. 

 

Do RPG Changes Affect You?

In our most recent EXTRA article, "Major Changes in RPG File Handling," we share about defining local files, passing files as parameters and specifying the QUALIFIED keyword on F-specs. Do these changes affect you? Do you understand how they may change your work? Are you using them or will you start? Any questions or comments?

Jon and Susan Get Educated

Some of you may remember that a few weeks back we mentioned that we would be heading to Boston for the inaugural DB2 for i Directions conference, and that we were looking forward to being students for a change. Well, it was a great event and we learned a lot -- our brains hurt!

One of the non-DB2 things we learned was to have more sympathy for our own students -- sitting in class and learning, learning, learning for days on end is tough. If we were a little closer in time to our school days (we wish!), perhaps it would have been a little easier. It made us even more determined to improve our own teaching skills to ensure that our students don't become overwhelmed. We'll be even more on the lookout for that "glazed over" look on our students' faces! We also learned that "Naked Fish" is a great restaurant that could use a few lessons in customer service, and that the Boston area has some really great brew pubs. 

On the DB2/SQL front, we learned far too much to be able to share it all with you here, but we will be covering a couple of items in the next edition of EXTRA so make sure that you're signed up to receive that when it comes out later this month. But just to give you a flavor of some of the things that came out during the course of the event ...

Handling Dates in SQL
For years we've watched as Internet discussions covered the topic of handling date fields in SQL -- for example when the DB2 table contains a "real" date field but the field in your program is an 8-digit numeric in YYMD form. This often leads to examples that include code such as this:

Select Date(Digits(MyNumDate) concat '000000') From MyTable ...

And that's a simple example. When the fake date is in character form things can get really ugly really quickly. The technique that we were introduced to during Directions came courtesy of a session on Web Query and is based on populating a table that has a row for each individual date in the range that you want to cover and a column for each replacement or comparison form you want of that date. For example for the date of February 1st, 2011, you might have a column containing 02/01/01, one containing 2001/02/01, one containing "Tuesday February the 1st, 2001", one containing 32 (the Julian day number), and ... well, you get the picture. It was kind of a "why didn't I think of that" moment. Rather than come up with a nasty convoluted SQL statement, a simple lookup can be incorporated in the statement which compares directly against the required date format. If you can't wait for EXTRA to come out to see how this all works, you can find the details in an appendix of the Web Query Redbooks publication. Does this approach perform well? According to the Redbooks, it outperforms direct usage of the SQL functions that would otherwise be required. We'll let you know what we find as we explore this further. 

CHAIN vs SELECT
During performance discussions with IBM's Mike Cain on the use of SQL for single row (as opposed to set-at-a-time) retrieval, Mike pointed out something that we hadn't thought about. Namely that if the SQL references only those columns that form part of the key, then the system is smart enough to know that it does not need to access the table itself, but rather can determine the found/not found status simply by referencing the index. Although we haven't had time to test this yet, Mike is convinced that it would perform as fast or faster than a CHAIN or SETLL used simply to determine if a given part number, customer number, or whatever, is valid. When we get a chance to test this out, we'll let you know the results.

We learned in Boston that it can be fun -- and tiring -- to be students. We came back with many good ideas on using SQL in our RPG programs. Not to worry -- we're still a long way from the "SQL is the answer -- now what's the question?" camp. Besides, we all know that RPG is the answer -- with or without SQL -- no matter the question, right? 

 

 

Musing on Comments, Updates and Travel

Some days, ideas for this blog seem to flow like water ... and then there are the days like today.

What to talk about? Well, for openers a quick thank you to Mihael Schmidt and Aaron Bartell for pointing out some of the tools we missed in our recent review of the world of RPG-oriented Open Source software which appeared in last month's EXTRA. If you don't subscribe to EXTRA (and you should!) you can find the original article here  and Mihael and Aaron's comments here. Thanks, guys. We won't elaborate on why these particular gems were omitted from the original list as we've already done our groveling in the comments section mentioned above. 

One comment we haven't yet responded to, until now, was from IBM's Nadir Amra. Nadir pointed out that our comments on IBM's offering, in the area of consuming Web services in RPG, was somewhat disparaging. And, more to the point, that we had apparently missed out on some recent updates that meant that RPG stubs are now generated to make the interface simpler. Guilty as charged. We had completely missed that change, Nadir, and thanks for pointing it out to us. Since the C compiler is still needed though we are however going withhold judgement on the utility of the revised version until we've had time to give it a test drive. We'll report back here, or in EXTRA, when we have had a chance to do that.

The fact that we were completely unaware of this particular update though does highlight an issue that we've encountered a number of times recently -- unknown IBM i enhancements. Maybe the details of this upgrade were published somewhere but we were completely unaware of them -- and we'd known for a while that some changes were in the offing. Yet we still missed them when they happened. If you know of a reliable source for information on these kinds of "between releases" updates please let us know -- 'cos we obviously aren't catching them all.

As we write this, we're in sunny Livonia, MI. Or at least it was sunny when we arrived -- it's dark right now. We're here for the annual MITEC conference and are looking forward to meeting the faithful at tomorrow's gathering of the clans. Our System i Developer colleague Paul Tuohy is here as well so we'll get the chance to catch up on the latest news from his time at COMMON Europe in Milan a couple of weeks ago. If you're at the conference please come up and say "Hi" -- we always enjoy meeting our readers in person. This is always a great event and it makes a nice change to be able to drive to a conference for once. For us, it's a four-and-a-half-hour drive -- longer than we'd normally take but no longer than flying. Wel,l the actual flight is only 30-40 minutes, but when you factor in the drive to/from the airport and all the extra time you have to spend in security screening, etc., it actually turns out to be as fast to drive. 

On that subject, we don't know how many of you regularly cross the Canada/U.S. border as we do (or for that matter the U.S./Mexico border) but it always strikes us as strange that you get a much more intensive "grilling" when flying cross border -- with limited luggage -- than you do when driving across with a whole car load of stuff. Guess they have their reasons -- but it does seem odd.

Until next week, go forth and do good things.

New XML Tooling

Jon has recently been examining a couple of open-source tools for generating XML documents we thought we’d mention here. So far he’s barely scratched the surface of what they can do, but so far he's impressed. The tools in question are powerExt and the XMLi Toolkit.

Some of you may remember that way back in 2007 we wrote an article describing an approach that used CGIDEV2 ("Using CGIDEV2 for Generating XML").  That approach has stood us in good stead for many years, but there were times (e.g., when there were large numbers of optional elements and attributes) when we felt a different approach may be useful. These tools offer alternative methods of building XML that deal with those situations. The raison d'être behind these tools is very different. The XMLi Toolkit's author, Larry Ducie, developed his tooling to simplify the process of generating XML within RPG programs. powerExt's XML generation capabilities, on the other hand, are just one part of a toolset designed for producing dynamic modern RPG-based Web applications. We briefly mentioned this Web tooling in our recent Extra article on RPG UI modernization "Still Dreaming."

For basic XML creation, the approach taken by both tools is similar. API calls are used to add elements to the document and these APIs ensure the correct formatting of the XML, including making appropriate substitutions for characters such as "<" and ">.” Both build the XML document in memory and provide APIs that allow the resulting document to be written to the IFS, etc.

The following (partial) code examples both generate the same very simple XML document and write it to an IFS file.

XMLi:

xmli_openTag( 'root' );                                           
   xmli_addElement( 'Element1' : elementValue1 );                            
   xmli_addElement( 'Element2' : elementValue2 );                     
xmli_closeTag( 'root' );

xmli_writeToFileWithVar( '/Partner400/XMLiTest.xml' 
                       : char1024 : XML_ENCODING_UTF8);
                   
powerExt:

xmlNode( 'root' );
      xmlNode( 'Element1' : '' : elementValue1 );
      xmlNode( 'Element2' : ' ': elementValue2 );
xmlEndNode();

echoToStmf( '/Partner400/powerExtTest.xml': 1208 );

As you can see, they’re very similar. But while both tools offer similar XML generation capabilities, XMLi goes one step further and offers a complete templating system that has offers some very impressive capabilities. It’s also designed as a plug-in style architecture and is therefore extensible to your specific needs.

XMLi Templating

The templating system is unbelievably powerful and allows for complete separation of the document layout from the RPG code that creates it. You'll have to download Larry's code samples to get a real idea of just how powerful this capability is. We'll keep our example simple and just attempt to match the creation of the XML document generated by the earlier code samples. Here's the template used:

<xmli:template xmlns:xmli="http://www.sourceforge.net/xmli" declaration="true"
   ccsid="1208" format="pretty" >
  <root>
      <Element1><xmli:value-of select="parm[1]" /></Element1>
      <Element2><xmli:value-of select="parm[2]" /></Element2>
  </root>
  <xmli:write-to-file path="'/Partner400/XMLiTemplateTest.xml'" />
</xmli:template>
 
Those of you familiar with xslt transforms will find this vaguely familiar. Note in particular the special values "parm[1]" and "parm[2.” These are supplied by the RPG code at run time. Here’s the RPG code:

xmli_loadTemplate('TEMP1' :'XMLiExamplesTemplatesExample11.xml');
xmli_setParm(1 : 'Parameter 1 Value');
xmli_setParm(2 : 'Parameter 2 Value');
                                             
xmli_runTemplate();

The interesting thing here is that, as with our CGIDEV2 approach, the template can be changed without changing the RPG code. Only if you want to add additional variables (parameters) do you need to change the RPG code; and even then it’s simply a matter of adding additional xmli_setParm() function calls. The really interesting thing is that templates can, among other things, include SQL to retrieve the data making for a truly dynamic environment. In fact, there’s even a command to allow templates to be executed without requiring any RPG code.

There's a lot to like with both of these tools and we're looking forward to spending more time working with them. In both cases the documentation is a little "thin" right now, but growing by the day and the example programs are very well documented and tell you most of what you need to know.

Thanks to Larry Ducie and Henrik Rützou for two excellent tools that can only help the IBM i community move forward.

Before we go ...
Just one last thing on the subject of community. IBM has added an IBM i-specific area to the DeveloperWorks website. There are some good links available and we're hopeful of seeing more good content in the future. Unlike the RPG Café, you don't need to sign in and so far the performance is pretty snappy--a welcome change. Check it out here.

Comment on "Webulating" Printer Output Revisited

Let's discuss our EXTRA article, "Webulating" Printer Output Revisited" below.