RE: Use of DUMP in production programs, WAS: RPG enhancement suggesti on

[Colin Williams <Williamsc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Option 3) looks the friendliest and will not affect existing processing,
so gets my vote.

-----Original Message-----
From: boldt@ca.ibm.com [mailto:boldt@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 3:48 PM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Use of DUMP in production programs, WAS: RPG enhancement
suggesti on




Buck wrote:
>Generally speaking, I'd rather that the end-user not see "white
messages."
>I would much rather trap the error myself, produce a post-mortem dump
and
>tell the user to call support for help.  My software looks much more
>professional telling the user to call support than if an "Invalid array
>index" error pops up.

How professional does your s/w look if the user has
to call support for help?  (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

I do see your point, though.

A simple, one-liner for us would be to ignore the
DEBUG keyword when deciding whether or not to
extract an input field.  As a result, unreferenced
fields would not appear on the dump, even with
DEBUG(*YES) coded.  If a field is not used within
a program, do you really care about its value?

How about a quick vote on some alternatives:

1) Don't show unreferenced fields on dump.
2) Keyword DEBUG(*ALLOW) which would allow the
   DUMP opcode to run, but unreferenced fields
   wouldn't be extracted.
3) Opcode DUMP *FORCE to force a dump to occur
   even if DEBUG(*YES) is not coded.  (Again,
   unreferenced fields would not be extracted.)

I'll add the results of the vote to our proposed
enhancements list.

Cheers! Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com


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