Buck,
For your "common code templates", give Snippets in RDi a try. You will have to open the view under Window > Show View > Other....
With snippets, you can set up a commonly used block of code, and put in placeholders for the variable bits. Then when you want to use it, place your cursor where you want the code to go, double click the Snippet to use, a dialog will come up for you to plug in the variable bits and then the block of code is inserted. I don't do green screen development any more, but at my previous job, I had snippets for things like subfiles. I still have snippets for defining and calling complicated API's or even for my code to read through a file using RLA. The snippet has the SETLL, READE, DOW, second READE, and ENDO all mapped out. I have place holders for the file name and the key.
You should definitely give it a spin. You might not miss your macros quite as much.
Brian May
IBM i Modernization Specialist
Profound Logic Software
http://www.profoundlogic.com
937-439-7925 Phone
877-224-7768 Toll Free
-----Original Message-----
From: wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Buck Calabro
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2013 9:32 AM
To: wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] Promoting WDSCi, RDp and/or RDi
On 12/20/2013 6:19 AM, Paul Bailey wrote:
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to force RDi on to my colleagues but when green-screen programmers of 20-30 years experience do adopt the new tool solely on my casual advice but then fall foul of such a critical bug as losing/misplacing source code changes then I feel a fool for promoting the tool. Happily, both programmers who suffered yesterday are (as I type) upgrading RDi to v9.0.1 and look like they will continue using it.
Those who try it generally go through the Phases of Software Change Grief.
1) Hate it. Why are they making me change?
2) Hate it. Why doesn't this behave exactly like the old stuff?
3) Hate it. There are so many bugs.
4) Hate it. Why do those twits in the support forum keep calling them features?
5) Eh, it's not too bad. At least I can see more lines of code.
6) Hate it. Why did they have to come out with a new release? Now I need to get used to the new UI!
7) GOTO 1. What's wrong with GOTO anyway...
(The SEU users who like to argue against RDi are looking a little smug
today, though.)
See how smug they'll look when SEU throws the epileptic siezure inducing screen as it tries to syntax check new SQL, CL and RPG syntax. Then they'll be oh-so forgiving of these... trifles. :-)
I don't think I ever used the REXX macros in Code/400... what did you do with them then that would be useful in today's RDi?
Mostly I write macros as a substitute for regular expression replace.
But I had a bunch written to do things like generate common code templates - subfile work, common key lists, various prototypes I use often and the like. Things which made my life easier than trying to find an example, copy it, modify it to suit the current program.
Rexx has several advantages for scripting an editor.
1) It is interpreted. Let's say I want to write a new macro that will convert D specs to the new fully free dcl-s spec. I open a new Rexx file on my local hard drive and start writing. Then I Alt-arrow to my RPG program, Esc > fullyFree and watch it work. It needs help so I Undo, alt-arrow, edit my macro and repeat. I get to develop and test in the same editor.
2) Rexx was designed to be an editor extension language. It's easy to hook Rexx into the Code editor.
3) The Code editor hooks are well documented and easy to implement.
Here's an example of a macro that I find useful. Imagine you're reformatting some code because you want to make it easier to understand.
You use alt-s and alt-j to handle spreading it out across multiple lines. Try this is RDi. Put the cursor on the O_INHERITMODE and then alt-s and then immediately alt-j.
bufOutfd = open( ifsOutFile : O_WRONLY + O_CREAT + O_INHERITMODE +
O_TRUNC + O_CCSID
: S_IRWXU
: CCSID_UTF16BE);
You get O_INHERITMODE waaaay off to the right. If you actually want to join the lines together, you are going to be mucking about with the arrow keys to select the white space so you can delete it. Here's a macro that does that for you.
/* delete white space between words */
/* place cursor on line where white space is to be compressed out */
/* given 123 456 789 */
/* cursor ^ */
/* yields 123 456 789 */
/* profinit.lxu */
/* assign alt-x to compress white space */
/* 'set action.a-x macro delWhite' */
/* pull the current line from the buffer */ 'extract content'
/* where is the cursor? */
'extract cursorcol'
lineLen = length(content)
/* if cursor at end of line, no white space to compress */ if (cursorCol = lineLen) then return
/* split the line into two parts at the cursor */ rightLen = lineLen-cursorCol+1 left = substr(content, 1, cursorcol-1) right = substr(content, cursorcol, rightLen)
/* reassemble the line, stripping off leading blanks from the right side */ work = left || strip(right,L,' ')
/* put the modified line back into the buffer */ 'set content' work return
As you can see from the comment, I also loaded this into my editor profile so it's assigned to a keystroke, but for infrequently used macros, just invoke them via Esc > macroName > Esc.
Having done one Java action for RDi, I can tell you that it's considerably more effort to test and debug something this simple in RDi than it ever was in Code/400.
I'm not complaining, exactly. I'm still on Software Grief step 4 :-)
--buck
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