Open Access RPG questions

Well, it was a battle, but we finally managed to prise a copy of Open Access RPG out of IBM. It took nearly two months of emails, phone calls and nagging, but eventually they responded. I really do worry about a company it's so hard to give your money to...

Just to give you the background to this posting, we had already been considering producing a set of RPG-friendly APIs to allow customers to read and write native Excel files in the IFS. We are still pursuing that development, but are now intending to provide access to this functionality via the OA RPG interface as well.

We've just started to work with the product for the first time, and have a few questions we've not been able to find answers to in the documentation or online so far. There will no doubt be others as the development continues. We're hoping somebody on this forum might be able to assist us with these.

1. Compiling on i 7.1 with TGTRLS(V6R1M0)

We are developing on our test server which is at V7. Our development server is at V5R4M0 in order to allow us to support earlier versions of OS/400 still in relation to our other products. We are aware that there is a PTF for V6 which adds support for OA RPG at that release. But we want to be able to compile for V6 on our V7 system and at present our compiles with TGTRLS(V6R1M0) specified are failing with an error message (RNF2023 "The keyword is not recognized...") relating to the HANDLER keyword on the F-specs. We have so far failed to find a PTF for V7 which addresses this. Anyone know if one exists or is planned, or are we missing a compile option? Or is there some way of applying the V6 PTF to our previous compiler support on V7?

I plan to try the latest V7 cume pack this weekend if no individual PTF can be identified for this.

2. Handling printer files

Yes, I know I've asked this question before, just trying again...

So far as I am aware, there is no equivalent to the QDBRTVFD (Retrieve Database File Description) and QDFRTVFD
(Retrieve Display File Description) APIs that works with printer files. The best we can do, I think, is use good old DSPFD to an outfile, but that doesn't give us all we'd like to know either.

This limits what can be achieved at the moment when the user is writing to an externally described printer file. For example, if a record has SPACEB(2) specified, we would like to be able to reflect this in the Excel output, maybe by jumping a row or increasing the row height, but at the moment, I don't believe we have any way of obtaining that information (other perhaps than parsing the DDS, but that is not guaranteed to be available). Anyone know of a way to obtain information about the keywords that are active for a printer file other than parsing source?

3. License keys

I was surprised to find that no license key appears to be necessary to use the product. I really don't understand the rationale behind charging for the product but not requiring a license key. We diligently paid our invoice yesterday, but I'm not sure everyone will do so. What am I missing? Can anyone explain IBM's thinking here?

Thanks

Pete