Re: Goodbye Old Friend - CODE400

On 3/9/2011 1:00 PM, John Larimer wrote:

I think the time has finally come. We upgraded our machine going to IBM i
v7.1 from v5r4 and CODE400 can't verify newly introduced features in RPG.
I've been using CODE400 daily since about 1999.

I've made several attempts transition to WDSC/RDi/RDp, all failures.
Today I am on RDp 7.6.0.

There are two things always bothered me about this tool compared to CODE400.

No support for extending the editor like we could with REXX Macros. I
created a fairly significant library of macros and found that the most
useful and productive were based off of the IBM supplied FIELDS macro. My
macros looped through the resulting field definitions generating code for
D-Specs (work fields, structures and so on), C-Specs (comparing fields to
work fields, moving data to/from work fields) and generating various types
of SQL statements. These macros saved me huge amounts of time and reduced
keying errors.

A kindred spirit! I salute you. For what it's worth, I have been
current on the GUI IDE product up until Rational began charging for it,
so I'm hovering on WDSC 7.0.0.8 against i/OS 5.4 for the time being. I
dearly miss macros. I played with the Eclipse Monkey project (now
defunct) but without knowing the guts of Eclipse and Lpex as it were, I
made very little progress.

I must tell you that not only is Code/400 still on my Windows 7 machine,
I still use it specifically for the macro capability. Rexx is WAY
EASIER to write and debug for macros than anything I've tried with
Eclipse. Apparently, Eclipse-using developers aren't interested in
macros. You'll find there are the merest handful of IBM i developers
who are interested in macros.

It's possible that I could duplicate my old macro functions within the
editor if only I could figure out how to access the Field Table generated
when you do a 'RIGHT CLICK' | 'SHOW FIELDS' on a F-Spec file definition. I
have not yet figured out how to do it. Any ideas on how to loop through the
generated Field Table and output lines to the editor? Does anyone have a
different idea that I should consider? I could use both editors and flip
back and forth but that seems counterproductive.

That's what I do (Code for macros, WDSC for everything else.) Filters
help tremendously, as does a separate connexion for each 'project'. As
far as I know, there's no approved way to reach into Lpex and grab the
information used by the Outline View. One can decompile Lpex classes
(Eclipse is open source; Lpex is not) and painstakingly observe how the
puzzle pieces fit together, but then one will discover that Eclipse 3.2
and 3.4 are not exactly compatible, and will trigger quite the re-write.
If, like me, you aren't fluent in Java, that will be... not fun.

The second concern for me is that when you do a 'SOURCE' | 'VERIFY' and
request the compile listing, CODE400 would put the listing in another editor
window where you could search, filter and do anything that the editor had
available. In RDp you get the listing but you can only scroll. There is
no search, no filter - nothing. Am I missing something?

The Eclipse-based (I wish there was a better way to say
WDS/WDSC/RDi/RDp!) way to review errors is to use the iSeries Error List
view instead of the iSeries Listings view.

An alternative is to select all, copy and paste into a Code session.

To be blunt, I find that Verify throws errors that Compile does not, and
it does so often enough that I've completely given up the use of Verify.
I just tried it on a debugged, working program. Verify took longer
than Compile AND it shows 'errors' that don't exist. Bah, forgot to
prompt and refresh the cache. That fixed all the errors except 'RNF1324
Keywords DFTACTGRP, ACTGRP, or USRPRF are not allowed.' (It's an
SQLRPGLE member)

I think I've got a long road ahead of me before I find RDp more productive
than my trusty old friend CODE400..

I love Code/400. Between macros and the ability to link it to a Windows
file extension, I really, really, really love it. Having said that,
I've tried very hard to use the Eclipse-based IDE instead of Code/400.
For the most part it's been a reasonable exchange. I only use Code now
when I want a macro, but that's maybe twice a week or so. Consistently,
for the past 7 years-ish.

Code is gone, and Rational has moved on. We must as well. I keep it
for macros, but there's no replacement for those. For the rest of the
list, once you've used macros, you really can't simply give them up.
The good news is that the Eclipse-based IDE is pretty good, and not that
hard to get used to. It even has PDM-style user commands (proto-macros,
if you will).
--buck