RE: passing parms between Cobol/400 & ILE-RPG

 >> I am told by other RPG programmers here that also do a little Cobol that
to pass parameters between Cobol and RPG, you have to define the *Entry
parameter in RPG as one long string and define subfields in a data
structure.

Horse hockey.  COBOL works exactly the same as RPG but it is easier to pass
a DS in COBOL than it is in RPG and so it is done more often.

 >> > I assume that the USING phrase allows multiple fields.  True or False?

True.  Specify the fields in the USING phrase in the _same_sequence_ as the
PARM list in the RPG.  The fields in the USING list _must_ be defined as 01
or 77 levels in the LINKAGE SECTION but do not have to be in the same
sequence as the parms.

The one problem that I have seen in the past has arisen because a field on
the database is (say) zoned numeric and so the COBOL programmer sets up his
parm as zoned, not realizing that the RPG program will have converted it to
packed and that is what he will receive.  Part of the reason that this
happens is that most RPG programmers don't realize that this happens, and as
long as they only call other RPG progs never see the problem.

Jon Paris
Partner400