Words of wisdom from the IBM i community
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 expect your commands to have different defaults.
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 IOException with the message “501 Unknown extension in database file name”.
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.
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 rather frustrating diagnostic problem with a customer … they installed a recent upgrade to our product and the java application…
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 values and telling it how much space you’ve allocated. Many APIs require you to allocate space to hold the returned info…
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 parameters were supported in the SQL variant of the language compiler and what parameters were not supported. I…
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 things work as well.
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. Most of the RSE framework is now part of the Eclipse Target Management project. Obviously…
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 post a review in a week or so (yeah, right). Anyways, it got me to…
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 these SQL functions: ENCRYPT_RC2(data, password) and DECRYPT_CHAR(data, password) . These looked promising and being that this is an internal-only system,…