Re: Change Non Observable to Observable?

[Pete Hall <peteh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:06 10/13/1998 , Mary Jo Whitcomb wrote:
>We just ordered our new 620.  We currently have a F45 running an older
>version of First Coast's Hospital Information System.  I have found three
>non-observable programs.  They show a window in GL applications where the
>user can select the company, or select the period and account to run a
>program against.  They are used, one of them frequently.
>
>To recompile them, you have to run a BLDWNDPGM command, for which we do not
>have the source.  Running this command still results in a non observable
>program.  We servered relations with First Coast several years ago, and I
>understand it was not ended in a friendly manner.
>
>Short of rebuilding a front end for the GL programs, is there a way to make
>these programs observable?  Maybe there is no way to do this, but I have
>come to expect miracles from this list.

Does your contract forbid reverse engineering or decompiling? Some do. What 
about moving the software to a different box? Most do. Having said that, I 
believe I'd start by trying to hack the BLDWNDPGM command. Could you possibly 
revoke authority to CHGPGM? Failing that, what objects does this command 
produce? Could you duplicate them individually by running standard commands 
yourself? Do you have the source that BLDWNDPGM compiles? If not, it must be 
hidden inside of some other object. If you could find it, maybe you could dump 
it and recover the source. You could also reverse engineer the offending 
programs. If you know what the entry parameters are and the expected output, 
you could probably write the code. OTOH, a little crow is pretty tasty from 
time to time. Maybe if you just called them up and asked...



Pete Hall
peteh@inwave.com 
http://www.inwave.com/~peteh/

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