Re: Returning error messages from RPG III to Java

On Thu, 2010-08-19 at 13:45 -0700, Jeff Wurst wrote:

Thanks in advance for any pointers on this.

From a little research I've found there are some options to replace the

5250 output with XML.
In this way you could call any RPG program and then capture the data you
need, in theory.
RPG OA is supposed to let you do this... there are other means of doing
this as well.
Probably this isn't the right fit for one small program but the right
path if you have
a lot of upgrading and are looking to consume the RPG output.

Personally I have not done the above but would would really like to...
currently I'm going directly to the data and reinventing the wheel in
most cases.

I have an old RPG III program that has a green screen and displays
messages from a message file in a message subfile at the bottom of the
screen. I need to retrofit the program to provide the option to suppress
the screen so that it can be called from a new Java program. The RPG
program still needs to do its normal validation of the business rules
and, with no user interface displayed, it needs to report back error
messages to the calling program.



The ProgramCall class has a getMessageList function. Is there any way to
load messages into this without crashing the RPG program? Is there a
normal way to accomplish my goal? I can always add program parameters or
use the LDA, but those options will introduce an upper limit on the
number of error messages that I can return.