Re: Open Access RPG questions -- RPG400-L

Peter

I suggest you go to the IBM site and look up Open Access in the PTF cover letter search. I found the 6.1 PTFs there - I wasn't looking for 7.1. But if previous release is not supported at 7.1, report it through a PMR. I suspect that the previous release support doesn't have the HANDLER keyword in it. That support uses a completely different library, after all. But the most recent doc doesn't mention lack of that support. I assume you've been over to the RPG Cafe to get the latest and greatest.

As for SPACEA, etc., there is a printer control structure that is sent to you - you get that information on a per-operation basis. A pointer to that data structure is in the main parameter to your handler.

HTH
Vern

On 9/9/2010 3:48 AM, Peter Clifford wrote:

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