RE: RPG CGI -- RPG400-L

I did have a program that parsed through an ASCII stream file, but it got deleted when I discontinued my membership at NETSHARE400.COM. What you need to do though is find out how he is going to send the data. Here is an example of how I was receiving info in an email:

Customer:Aaron Bartell

OrderNumber:1234

ItemOrdered:Toilet Paper

QtyOfItem:2

CreditCardNo:1234 5678 8909 1234

CreditCardExpMMYY:0502

etc . . .

Since I new that each order would start with a customer I would search for 'Customer' and start filling an array with all of the information that followed and then when I found field 'Customer' again I new that it was a new order. Actually now that I think about that some more I think I searched for the colon that separated the data from the descriptor. And then when I found a colon I would search back until I found a space and then I knew I had my field.

Basically you are going to want to buff up on your SUBST and SCAN BIF's otherwise it is easy to get lost.

Aaron Bartell

PS. I just talked to another guy in our group that has his own 400 and asked him if I had copied the email parsing program there, but right now he doesn't have access to the box to check; so I will keep you posted if I find it.

-----Original Message-----
From: tomh@simas.com [mailto:tomh@simas.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 6:36 AM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: RE: RPG CGI

The boss was pitching an idea to the customer, the idea being that he (the customer) could send us the file in either of two ways: 1) as an attached Excel spreadsheet, and/or 2) as an email message.

I was finally able to convince him that a better file format would be ASCII text, comma-delimited so that we could do just as you suggest - FTP the file into our databases (incidentally, this is exactly what we do for other stuff).

I have a feeling, though, that the email option will remain. Having said that - do you have an RPGLE example or two of how to read thru an email?

"Bartell, Aaron L. (TC)" <ALBartell@taylorcorp.com>
Sent by: owner-rpg400-l@midrange.com
03/13/01 05:46 PM
Please respond to RPG400-L

To: "'RPG400-L@midrange.com'" <RPG400-L@midrange.com>
cc:
Subject: RE: RPG CGI

If you are going to use email, which isn't what I would call a reliable EDI method, have them send the inventory update in an attached file and then read through that for the particular items that you need to update. This is just my first thought. I don't think one would want to parse through the actual email including all of the header information. Ask him if he has the capability to FTP then you could just have him FTP to your machine and PUT a file in the IFS that contains the inventory updates.

But to answer you question in short, yes you can use the read() C API function in an RPG pgm.

Aaron Bartell
-----Original Message-----
From: tomh@simas.com [mailto:tomh@simas.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2001 4:13 PM
To: rpg400-l@midrange.com
Subject: RPG CGI

We use our 400 as an SMTP and POP3 server. Can I use APIs to read thru the body of some emails, extracting some information? We have a customer who'd like to send us inventory updates in an email.