Re: OPNQRYF Observation

I confess to being a big OPNQRYF user, but understand that this is not a
tactical direction for IBM.  As a matter of fact, at Fall COMMON, IBM was
floating a trial balloon that they would not enable OPNQRYF in the future
to operate on database files with newly (e.g.: to be) added data types.
(That went over like a lead balloon, so they withdrew the statement.)

Nevertheless, the way to go today is SQL, because it is alleged to be an
industry standard.  (And if you believe that, I'd like to sell you a
bridge.  It goes from City Hall to Brooklyn.)

BTW.  OPNQRYF was developed as a debugging aid for the development of SQL,
and never originally intended for end customer use.

Al Barsa, Jr.
Barsa Consulting Group, LLC

400>390

914-251-1234
914-251-9406 fax

http://www.barsaconsulting.com
http://www.taatool.com





                                                                                
                                         
                    MacWheel99@aol.com                                          
                                         
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                    owner-midrange-l@mi        cc:                              
                                         
                    drange.com                 Subject:     OPNQRYF Observation 
                                         
                                                                                
                                         
                                                                                
                                         
                    05/23/01 12:03 PM                                           
                                         
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                    MIDRANGE-L                                                  
                                         
                                                                                
                                         
                                                                                
                                         




I am a bit behind the times, learning how to use things for the first time
about the time everyone else who ever learned it is moving on to other
technologies.

Suffice it to say that last nite I wrote my first CL that had an OPNQRYF in

it.
I thought the difficulty was that you cannot concatenate a numeric
variable,
but I needed to *EQ a numeric value with a numeric field, and you can't
compare alpha to numeric, then when I finally got the darn thing to compile
&
run without any errors, it came up with zero data.  Come to find our hours
later my choice of test data was in fact empty ... occasionally AL MAKES A
MISTAKE.

Since the OPNQRYF selection of data was new software &
since the RPG program the data was being fed to was also a new program &
since I did not realize that there was in fact no data that met the
original
test conditions

something that would have been very useful to me while trying different
test
conditions would have been some piece of code between the OPNQRYF statement

and the CALL RPG statement
to SNDPGMMSG or something that identified the number of records found by
OPNQRYF
and I mean to a log that I can read after I have exited the program, not
just
on bottom of screen while it is running.
I was doing tests with CHGJOB cranked up to LOG(*YES) and seeing tons of
other stuff cluttering the picture.

This is now an academic question since by the end of the evening my new
software was working satisfactorily.  It is not as elegant as I would have
liked, but it works.

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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