Words of wisdom from the IBM i community
Things are happening in the System i / iSeries / AS400 community. The COMMON conference is just around the corner … and there promises to be some pretty big news announced there. Trevor Perry announced a new site: www.i4everyone.com as a place to showcase YOUR marketing ideas for System i. He is looking for images…
I have started to read more of Timothy Pricket Morgan’s (from here on out written as Tim) articles and am liking how he approaches the usefulness of the iSeries. What I mean by that is he realizes that some significant ground could be made in the RPG programming realm if the higher up stiff necks…
Strange as it sounds … this is what I’ve observed on a new System i5 Model 520 we just took delivery of at work. I could be wrong, of course, but I do have pictures to back up the claim… Here’s the backplane of the system … Here’s a closeup of the…
By now most everybody has heard of the term SOA which stands for Service Oriented Architecture and if you are like others, including myself, you have been inundated with high-level zero-informative type explanations that abstract the definition out to the point of no return. In this blog entry I would like give my take on…
Back in February, IBM Systems Magazine ran an article “The Name Game” by Neil Tardy. Yours truly was quoted in the article … but Neil only mentioned the names of my wife and my laptops (lorien & rohan respectively). For the record: The main mail server that runs midrange.com is named ‘rivendell’ and the primary…
As many of you know, it’s possible to access most of the midrange.com mailing lists via a news reader (nntp) using the gmane.org news server. Now, however, it’s also possible to access the lists via a news reader using a midrange.com news server! Visit news.midrange.com for information on how to do this. In order to…
Minor announcement … midrange.com’s mail server has been upgraded. It used to be a Dell PowerEdge 600SC (2.4ghz P4, 640mb ram, 160gb dasd). It is now a Dell PowerEdge SC430 (3ghz P4 Dual Core, 1gb ram, 160gb dasd). The old server wasn’t failing, and was still capable of doing the job, but it was quite…
Finally, the Super Bowl is over. Done. Finito. And am I glad. Oh that was one painful evening. I’m not sure who felt the most pain, me or that guy grimacing as he did a great job of butchering the national anthem at the opening. Clearly, he was in need of some morphine and I…
Our title’s Latin translation is “scraped tablet” or “blank slate”. I find it fitting since I intend to talk about the ‘best’ way to fully erase your system using native iSeries support. This question arises frequently when Disaster Recovery testing is performed at an offsite location or company has upgraded their iSeries and is relocating…
Reporting on iSeries has come a long way. Traditionally, iSeries developers have to create reports using RLU, and then the RPG report program creates a spool file which the user then prints for his analysis. ItÂ’s a normal sight to see users printing bulk print-outs from the spool file. Then the need came for sending the reports via email, and there are lot of tools now to convert spool files to PDFs to send the reports to others. Though these converted reports to PDF will suffice, they do not have a professional look; they may lack a company logo and there is no way to show different colors, charts, internationalization, bar codes, different fonts, etc.
Though you can buy a vendor product to do all those things, why not try Jasper Reports for free? With Jasper, you can achieve all these things and create a professional looking report with any formats you wish (PDF, Excel, rich text format, XML, and CSV). However, to use Jasper, you will have to use java, and integrate Jasper in your java programs. And moreover, you will have to write SQLs to generate the data for your report. Thus, it might not be the best idea to write a complex SQL to generate a report (for example, a purchase order report), in order to replace or imitate a legacy reporting RPG program. In that case, the conversion tools (converting spool to pdf) will be a better option.
So, consider using Jasper for any new reports or for any small-to-complicated reports where not more than 2 or 3 files are needed, or for any files with less data.