Re: S/ 36 stuff on the AS/400 -- MIDRANGE-L

Steven

You have a lot of questions & I will answer them in pieces so as to avoid an 
excessively long post here.  Three years ago I was in your shoes.  We were 
migrating from S/36 to AS/400 & it was daunting.

CL was an ALIEN language, big time, compared to OCL, in my eyes.  It took me 
several IBM programming classes & working with a lot of code to get competent 
as a CL programmer & I still do not feel as comfortable with it as I did with 
OCL, but I used OCL & its forerunners for almost 3 decades.

RPG/36 was LIKE RPG II 1/2 while RPG/400 is LIKE RPG III 1/2

You might find this list to be a bit overwhelming since the volume of traffic 
is pretty high on topics that might not be of interest to someone in your 
position ... you might want to review how comfortable you are with other 
AS/400 & old S/36 people user Q+A resources such as the forums of
http://www.as400network.com
http://www.midrangecomputing.com/forums/
http://www.as400.ibm.com/developer/ssp/moremigr.html
I find quite a few educational discussions about the 400 on
http://www.techrepublic.com/index.jhtml
but I have not encountered any S/36 community there

Questions - HISTORY
Yes you can do History on AS/400 like you did on S/36 except it is MUCH more 
complicated.
On S/36 history was basically LOG ON / LOG OFF ... capture a good picture or 
not capture much detail, and figure out how to navigate the collected data
With AS/400 you have these layers & severity settings - you set them within 
the "session rules" - to oversimplify greatly & clarify more in a later post, 
IBM messages & activity has degrees of seriousness & you can set which of 
these degrees reach a threshold of being important enough to include in your 
job log ... so for example I have set a threshhold to capture a lot of detail 
in some stuff that my users send to JOBQ so that if the job goes belly up, I 
have the info, but I am killing hundreds of unwanted joblogs every nite.
Figuring out how AS/400 logging works will take a while & I suggest tweaking 
one value a little bit & SEEING what happens, then tweaking another value a 
little bit a few weeks later & SEEING what happens, as a route to getting 
comfortable with what all this stuff MEANS.

The spool facility is DIFFERENT.  If has all the stuff you had on S/36 and 
more.  It is just organized differently.  There are several IBM manuals that 
have charts of like

I used to do DF space P on S/36 to see all MY reports ... what is the 
equivalent OS/400 command ... WRKSPLF

For security reasons, we have put a bunch of these OS/400 spool file access 
commands on a user menu PRINT ... they take a menu option & they see 
everything waiting in print Q at particular printer, in particular spool 
file, just their stuff, etc.

But you need to start with the IBM manuals that are aimed at S/36 people 
learning OS/400 printer navigation.

PDM has a lot of neat stuff ... it is very much like POP
You need to have proper documentation
For POP there was this book "Everything you ever wanted to know about POP but 
never knew to ask"
There is the same kind of stuff for PDM

Today my favorite PDM option is 54
in which you can compare 2 versions of the same program & be shown all the 
lines that are different.  I wish I had known about that when I was doing Y2K 
conversion.

I never used FILE CASHQ so I not know what exactly that does, but if it was a 
way to dump the contents of a file to your screen, try DSPPFM CASHQ - there's 
a command to show the data in various different formats similar to POP but I 
much prefer RUNQRY *N CASHQ then F4 change bottom line to *YES because I can 
change selection criteria on the fly for which records to be looking at

RUNQRY *N then some file name is using Query/400 to access that file without 
having to have any Query defined in advance

I think DFU/400 is a bit more powerful than DFU/36 once you figure out how to 
use it ... try STRDFU & take option 5

Option 5 uses DFU to access the file without having to have any DFU defined 
in advance

If you understand logicals, you can then access the file in a great variety 
of actual sequences & see all the data that is in each record, with the 
external layout fully amplifying what each field MEANS.

I have not had occasion to do the kind of object string search that you 
describe, but I have had occasion to use IBM DUMP *OUTFILE various lists of 
IBM objects to a file that I can then access in query.

So for example, my users have a menu option that lists all the query/400 that 
we have in sequence by the alpha description of the option (we refresh this 
every nite) - this tells them the query that we have that will get them what 
they want, then they take another menu option which really is RUNQRY in which 
they key in the name of the query they want to run.  This gives the mass of 
users access to our library of query/400 without having to pass out command 
line authority.

I have been amazed at the volume of shareware & open source that I have found 
for the AS/400 & rather than put links here in this thread, I think I will do 
a FAQ on this topic some time to the AS/400 FAQ that we have recently been 
discussing in another thread.

Some of your questions are not S/36 per se & belong in separate threads.
Have you visited the archives of this list?
Some of your questions may already have been answered there.
http://archive.midrange.com

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
AS/400 Data Manager & Programmer for BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 mixed mode (twinax 
interactive & batch) @ http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies - fax # 812-424-6838

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