Re: Service Program or Stand Alone

<Jeff Young>
Newer programs are being written that *do* use ILE functions (where
appropriate).
In these programs, it is often necessary to call some of these "Black Box
programs".
Is there any benefit to converting them to Service Programs?
</Jeff Young>

Simple technical changes, just for changing it, don't have any benefit, but might expose riscs. I would recommend to break the process down to steps:
- provide procedure wrappers for your OPM programm, if you have such an animal with function code, one for each code
seperate in and out parms by defining a returntype (Datastructure) for the return values and make the input parameters called by value in the prototype. The complete logic remains in your unchanged OPM Programm and is called by the new wrapping procedures.
- in new ILE programms use the wrapping procedures, don't use the OPM
- in case of changing one of the existing ILE programms, which is using the OPM call, change it to use the wrapping procedure.
- in case of changing the implementing OPM programm, move the logic to the wrapping procedures and provide an OPM wrapper for all programms using the OPM version.
- in case of major changes to one of your OPM programms, decide wether it coul be worth to migrate the programm to ILE. In this case change the call to the OPM function to the procedure version.

Dieter