Re: Writing to a Windows server instead of to the IFS

Man... now i feel even more dense.

Scott, your explanation was, as always, concise and easy to understand.

However I still can't figure out how to do it. Maybe I can ask the question in a simple enough way that even I can understand the answer?

Lets use, for an example, this problem: I want a user, any authorized user, to be able to take an i5 menu option, get a screen asking for a month and year, and then have the i5 gather the data and send that data in a .csv file to the desktop of the user that made the request. The ordinary user will not know the name of his PC, nor the path to his desktop. I can do almost all of that right now, including writing the file to the IFS (thanks to your work). But I can't write to the desktop.
The issue has importance here because the .csv file is close to 90 megs in size, and opening the file from a mapped network drive to the IFS takes forever to open in Excel. From the desktop it opens in under a minute. We haven't tested it yet but we are suspicious that opening the file from a Windows server will also be slow, so we are hoping we can write directly to the desktop, which we suspect the user really wants, anyway.

At first I felt it was just me being obtuse, stubborn, ans silly, but as I ask others that I know are knowledgeable i5 users it becomes clear to me that while I may be dense, I am not alone in my denseness.


And! Scott, thank you.

And! Vern, thank you.


Scott Klement wrote:

Hi Booth,

I guess I don't really understand the problem. You say you want to write to a windows PC. Let's assume that the Windows PC is named BOOTHSPC and on that PC is a shared named "SharedDir".

You code your open statement like this:

filename = '/QNTC/BOOTHSPC/SharedDir/MyFile.txt';
fd = open( %trimr(filename): O_CREAT+O_WRONLY; S_IRWXU);

That's pretty much it. Just by starting the filename with '/QNTC/BOOTHSPC/SharedDir' the system will automatically connect to BOOTHSPC, log in (using the userid/password you're signed into i5/OS under) and create the file on that PC.

How could it be more easy/straightforward that that?

Things only get tricky when your Windows network won't let i5/OS connect, or when your userid/password on i5/OS doesn't match the ones that Windows accepts.


Booth Martin wrote:

Man, I can be dense. None of these answers look easy & straight forward.

I am using Scott Klement's examples to write a PC file to the IFS of the System i. It uses a path & file name, which of course I expect. It occurs to me that one can type in any path name and there is no real reason that it won't write directly to what ever is at that path?

But like so many things, it just isn't so. My first question is: Am I dreaming? Is it really simple, or is it a lot of hoop-jumping and therefore of limited value??