Re: Would it be a reasonable to ask IBM's programmers to, write a %sortsfl(sfl: column)

That has been available to some extent for some time Steve - it is generally referred to as the WebFacing API and is used by many software vendors. For whatever reason IBM decided to restrict the use of the API to ISVs who meet certain criteria and conditions. My best guess is that IBM want the ability to change the underlying API in the future and don't want it escaping "into the wild" because then they would be hogtied. Bruce Vining might be able to shed some more light on this.

It doesn't help a lot with the sorting issue though - it is the device buffer that is made available to the API - and that only includes the currently visible portion of the subfile.

It is possible that the upcoming RPG enhancements (referred to previously as Open I/O) will allow for some enterprising vendors (or open source group) to come up with something that will allow this to be done fairly easily - but until IBM go open kimono on the details we won't know.


Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com



On Dec 6, 2009, at 1:00 PM, midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

An API, perhaps, which is an exit program on display files. Where
instead of ( or in addition to ) directing the display I/O to the
display device, the specified exit program is called. That way a
program that uses a display file could be unchanged, but the green
screen aspect of it replaced with something else. Whatever the exit
program forwarded the display I/O onto.