Re: QADBIFLD versus DSPFFD OUTPUT(*OUTFILE)

On 2/5/2013 6:22 PM, John Yeung wrote:

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Is it possible that decimal place is given a different name? Like precision?

It's exceptionally unlikely. Python makes it very easy to introspect
(such as getting a list of all an object's attributes) and I haven't
found anything. I've asked on the iSeries Python forum, but I don't
expect to hear back. (There are not many of us!)

I'll check out that forum.

As for SYSCOLUMNS / QADBFILD, none of the columns there reflect the
external buffer length. I'm not sure I want them to, as I tend to use
this for directly processing a swath of data off of disk, and I'd rather
know how much room a date field occupies there (4 bytes) rather than in
the external buffer as seen by HLLs like RPG.

However, having said that, I completely understand why that's
frustrating, because it'd be very cool to know the external buffer
length for more typical processing chores. The QUSLFLD API returns the
expected external buffer length of 10 for date fields (I just checked it).

Not being an IBM Python-er (yet) I don't know how to package the output
of an API for Python to consume. My very wild guess is to put the API
in an RPG program that creates a result set of the columns and then
Python traverses the result set. Might be a ridiculous idea, who knows?
--buck