RE: Service programs, procedures, not sure what to do

Whoa, thanks for the link and the code Dieter!

And those are good suggestions. I once did a couple of generic set() s with pointer passing and decided against it because that way loses all tracking of type and length and other relevant validation. Pointers are dangerous, tread carefully, but powerful when you use them right.

I have used service programs with procedures similar to the set(property:value) format but ONLY within the module, no *EXPORT necessary, and it was only for setting up an externally described data structure for writing out to the database (or updating it), in this case a control file record. But for the caller program, it had access to SetProperty(value) procedures.

-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
D*B
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2015 2:28 PM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i
Subject: Re: Service programs, procedures, not sure what to do

... its a liitle bit offtopic for the OP, but...
@ set(property : value): the drawback of this aproach is: readability and you
loose all type checking of the compiler => I would not recommend this, it's a
bad practice!
@ the caller owns the memory: another rpg- typic bad practice! this aproach
destroys all encapsulation, the contents of the memory could be corrupted
by the caller => I would strongly recommend to avoid this!!!
@ multiple instances: you could define a DS instanceType based dummy
pointer, containing all "instance Variables" (:= all statefull information) then
you woul need a procedure new (a "Constructor") returning an instance (an
int as a handle), allocating storage for another occurence of a DS of
instanceType. Last not least you would have an additional parm int handle
for all exported procedures. For an example you could have a look to:
http://bender-dv.de/Sourcen/QRPGLESRC.APILIST .

@OP: I would start to forget Subroutines and using subprocedures instead.
Second step would be to forget the opcodes call and callb and to use callp
instead. When you habe incorporated this, next step would be to export
procedures. When this is managed, come bacjk to discussion about design of
modules and SRVPGMs.

D*B

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