RE: Knotty puzzle with chaining to files not known at compile time

["Larry Ducie" <larry_ducie@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Joe,

<snip>
Happy Fourth, Larry!

I'm a little confused (not that that's unusual).  What do you mean "iterate 
through each column"?  The ResultSet in JDBC has a next() method which 
positions you to the next row, at which point you do getXxx (e.g., 
getString, getFloat) passing either an ordinal column number or a String 
containing a column name to get the appropriate field from the current row. 
I don't have to iterate through the columns.
</snip>

Happy Fourth to you I guess. But being British you'll forgive my somewhat 
luke-warm aproach to your celebrations. ;-)

OK. The comparison I was drawing was based on trying to perform two 
fundamentally similar tasks:
1) Within RPG - use QSQPRCED to dynamically retrieve data from columns in a 
result set which is not known at runtime.
2) Within Java - use JDBC to dynamically retrieve data from columns in a 
result set which is not known at runtime.

I have done both, and I believe the process is similar. Consider building a 
very basic query processor using Swing. You have a SQL scratchpad and a 
table to display the results. As you have no idea what the resultset will 
look like (because you don't know what query the user will type) you have to 
build code which simply processes each row, and for each row processes each 
column - retrieve the data, format it, and place it in a String object. Once 
done, you can display the table data.

To obtain the same result in RPG I would use QSQPRCED and a couple of 
for-loops. I could have used the phrase "sequencially process in a looping 
fashion" instead of iterate but I assumed they were the same - and iterate 
takes less typing. :-)

Anyway, you say tomato, I say tomato...

Cheers

Larry Ducie