Re: Changing a service program

Joe:

You do not have to recompile "P" .. unless you added a new procedure to "S" and you now want to call that new procedure    That's the whole idea of *SRVPGMs.  It is all about when P gets "activated" in a job, not when it gets recompiled.  That is when it "resolves" the pointers to "S" ... this happens within each unique job that calls "P"...

You can just sign-off and sign-on again, after recompiling, as Barbara indicated in her reply, or you can also issue:
    RRTJOB
as this seems to "clean-up" the job back to its initial state.


Hope that helps,

Mark S. Waterbury

On Sunday, November 17, 2019, 8:44:39 AM EST, Joep Beckeringh via MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

When I think I understand something about RPG and Barbara claims she
doesn't, it is time to start worrying :-)

This is how I understand it:
- When program P, which uses service program S, is activated, S is
located and P receives pointers to the procedures it uses;
- When service program S is recreated, the old version is moved to
QRPLOBJ; P keeps the pointers to the old version in QRPLOBJ; thus it
doesn't "see" the new version;
- When program P is recreated and activated, S is located and so the new
P receives pointers to the new S; and thus it "sees" the new version.

Am I wrong in my understanding?

Joep Beckeringh


Op 16-11-2019 om 14:17 schreef Barbara Morris:

On 2019-11-15 10:01 p.m., smith5646midrange@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

...
What I still don't understand is that I didn't add or remove any
procedures.  I only modified the code within an existing one but the
changes won't execute until I recompile the program.  I thought the
idea of a service program is that you could make changes (if you
found a bug for example) and not have to recompile everything that
used it because it would automatically pick up the new version.  Is
there a restriction that if you change an existing function that you
have to recompile all of the calling programs?

I also thought the service program was not bound into the program
(like a module would be) but when I deleted the service program, the
program still ran.
...

When a service program has been used in an activation group, the
activation group "remembers" the service program. If you change the
service program, the change won't be noticed by anything in the
activation group. (It might be "anything already in the activation
group, which would explain why recompiling the program made it see the
new version of the srvpgm, but I don't really understand how that
aspect of activation groups works.)

When you change a service program, you _could_ (but shouldn't) reclaim
the activation group. I say "shouldn't" because reclaiming activation
groups can sometimes cause strange problems if other activation groups
have hooks into the reclaimed one.

So I find it's safer, and easier in the long run, to just sign off and
sign back on again.