Re: QADBIFLD versus DSPFFD OUTPUT(*OUTFILE)

["Troy Hyde" <thyde@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

You may face security issues using QADBIFLD.  If you're planning on end-user 
programs accessing the file you may need to have programs that adopt higher 
authority.

Also, you will not find files that reside in QTEMP in QADBIFLD where dspffd 
works against QTEMP w/out issues.  Probably not an problem but something of 
which one should be aware.

That being said, I prefer to use the QUSLFLD API rather than dspffd 
output(*file).  IBM gives us the tools. I say use 'em.

Troy

-----Original Message----- 
From: John Yeung ; John Yeung
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2013 11:49 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: QADBIFLD versus DSPFFD OUTPUT(*OUTFILE)

In another thread, someone mentioned getting field information from
QADBIFLD.  I wish I'd known about this years ago.  Now that I do know
about it, it seems like creating an output file from DSPFFD is a slow
and clumsy way to go about getting essentially the same information.

Are there any advantages to using DSPFFD?  Right now, I can think of
two:  (1) arguably friendlier for interactive use; and (2) provides
buffer lengths instead of internal lengths (which makes a difference
for date, time, and timestamp fields).

John