RE: SUBROC

Sounds like one of those assembler routines they warned us 36-ers about. I, too, work primarily in the 36 environment; most of our programs are still RPG II. But RPG II can call RPG IV, not that that is going to help you here.

I rarely go through the trouble to convert the RPG II programs to RPG IV, but on the few occasions that I have (sans a complete re-write) I converted them to RPG III first, then used the converter to move them to RPG IV.

Jerry C. Adams
IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
B&W Wholesale
office: 615-995-7024
email: jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Kevin Nunn
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 6:44 PM
To: RPG400-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: SUBROC

Hello All,

I've searched the vast internet and my problem is just too old to show up
anywhere :)

I used to be a consult for 4 clients on Advanced/36 machines, I know RPG2
inside out. 2 Years ago I took a full time job with one of my clients as
work was way to slow. I finally got them on a used AS400 and I am working on
rewriting their software in RPGILE (love it!).

Two of my other clients have converted over to an AS400 with the help of a
consultant company in my area. The last client has finally decided to get an
AS400, but they want to completely retain the programs as is. No, problem,
they'll be just run in a S/36 environment.

The problem is, several of their programs use an IBM supplied subroutine
called SUBROC to open/close a file. We used it to open/close the spool file
in order to print without exiting the program. For on demand checks for
instance.

Does anyone know of a work around for this? My first thought was to write an
ILE program that would be called from the S36 program, but 1) Not sure if a
ILE program can be called from a S36 RPG program, I think CL can, so it
should work; 2) Would the called ILE program have the access to the file and
be able to CLOSE the file, and then re-OPEN it.

Or is there some other way I could do this without exiting the program,
which would in effect, clear all the temp fields that are used?

Thanks - and I wanted to say I have really been enjoying reading the
discussions, it's been helping my learning process :)

Kev