Re: Retreiving RPG source at version 7.1

On Aug 24, 2011, at 1:29 PM, midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Never let it be said that I should contradict the list owner <grin> but in this case ...

If you compile a program with the *SOURCE debug view you can access the source code listing ... but I don't think there is a way to extract that from the object (unlike the RTVCLSRC command).

You can't view the source listing David - you can only view the actual source - nothing is stored but a link to the source file.

You might be able to reconstruct the source if you did a DMPOBJ on the program and wrote a program to interpret the output.

Nope - for the reasons stated above. It is one of the reasons I always use Debug Listing *ALL

There are 3rd party products that purport to be able to extract source from a program. I've never tried them though.

I don't believe that there are any currently available for RPG IV that can be run by a customer. Only "service" offerings that are incredibly expensive. Most customers that I have worked with who needed the tool found it significantly cheaper to rewrite the program.

OPM programs stored the MI stream. which included some comments about the operation code being generated for etc. (Even more so for COBOL than RPG) The generated code patterns were identifiable so it was possible to write tools that did a pretty good job of reverse translating. The instruction stream stored with ILE programs (MI prime flavor of W-code) is much more itsy-bitsy, and is probably less predictable in its sequence than the old MI due to the impact of the optimizer. Plus of course IBM have never published the format of W-code so you have do decipher that before anything else.

All in all a rewrite is usually the cheap option!


Jon Paris

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www.SystemiDeveloper.com