Context Is Key
Ha! I’ll bet you thought this blog was dead. Well, in the words of Miracle Max, only mostly dead. I’m in the process of reading a new programming book (well, not new to some … new to me). I’ll probably...
View ArticlePlug-in Developers Reference
Those of us who are developing plug-ins for WDSC / RDi are in for a bit of a shock now that RDi 7.5 has been released. IBM has moved the RSE from a proprietary, closed source, framework to open source....
View ArticleThe How and The Why
As technologists we are often called upon to figure out HOW things work in a system. The question I would pose is: Is understanding HOW things work sufficient? My answer: No, you must also know WHY...
View ArticleAnalyzing Commands with Java
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts … building tools can be a fun & rewarding part of the job. As part of a recent programming task, I had to do some analysis on commands to determine what...
View ArticleQuick Tip: API data lengths
Here’s a quick tip for troubleshooting API calls: If you are calling an API and notice that data you are expecting isn’t being provided, verify that you are allocating enough space for the return...
View ArticleSQL Columns with CCSID 1200
I’ve recently been working on an ILE RPG program that needs to read a SQL table that has a VARCHAR column encoded with CCSID 1200 (Unicode). Since RPG doesn’t normally handle Unicode, it takes a little...
View ArticleExtendedIOException in Java
If your java application starts encountering a ExtendedIOException error while trying to access files in the IFS, check to see if you’ve got a 3rd party security exit program in place. I just had a...
View ArticleLog File Diagnostics
Quick tip: When you are logging information for diagnostic purposes … make sure you include some information that allows you to correlate transactions to user or system actions. For instance: When I...
View ArticleQuick Tip: Using Apache Commons Net with IBM i
Something I recently ran into … I use the Apache Commons Net library in some of my java code. I ran into a problem where, when trying to upload a save file to the host via FTP, I encountered an...
View ArticleCommand Defaults
This may seem to be a no-brainer … but it’s very important to NOT change command parameter defaults on commands in the QSYS library. This is especially true if you use 3rd party software that may not...
View ArticleEasy Field Encyption for System i
For our new billing system (AR), we wanted to store account numbers for so that our customers could auto-pay their bills. After some searching and seeing how complicated the APIs are to use, I found...
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