Re: Creating a REST API with RPGLE

On Oct 8, 2022, at 4:00 PM, Brad Stone <bvstone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Because if the data resides on the IBM i... RPG and the Apache server with
YAJL are really the easiest way to do it. :)

On Sat, Oct 8, 2022 at 1:33 PM Richard Schoen <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Out of curiosity is there a reason you can't still use C# ?

Web apps and web apis done in C# and hosted on Windows or Linux are quite
usable as well and can interact with your RPG via ODBC database calls and
the IBMi Access ODBC driver.

You also have things like Java, Python, Node and PHP available.

Another interesting option if you want to create an RPG web service is
ILEAstic.

You have options.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Web: http://www.richardschoen.net
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

----------------------------------------------------------------------

message: 1
date: Fri, 7 Oct 2022 20:54:11 -0400
from: smith5646midrange@xxxxxxxxx
subject: [WEB400] Creating a REST API with RPGLE

First, let me say I am trying to do something here that I have zilch
experience with from the IBM i perspective. I have done this type of stuff
using C#.Net on Windows but nothing on the IBM i. Yesterday was my first
voyage into IBM Web Administration for i.

That said, I am trying to create a REST API written in RPGLE that will
return JSON data. I have looked at a lot of examples but just can't find
what I am after.

This needs to be modeled after some existing C#.Net REST APIs so the
following requirements are not negotiable.

The request needs to be a POST type.
The body of the POST request needs to have two "fields".
1) Input - An SQL statement that will be used to retrieve the data.
2) Output - The results of the SQL. These results can be anything so
the fields can't be predefined in the RPGLE program's parameters like they
are in all of the examples that I find. There can also be multiple records
so it would end up having an array in the results. I think I need a single
"results" field that is pretty big and I will need to manually build the
JSON for it.

I tried creating a new HTTP server and deploying a service to it. I have
been successful using Scott's customer lookup as a model and I have been
able to do a few different things to experiment. However, I can't figure
out how to handle the POST body for input or the array results in the
output.

One attempt was to create the following:
dcl-pi *n;
sql char(5000);
resultSet char(50000);
end-pi;
The problem was that I got back a value in the resultSet that was really
junked up JSON because it escaped all of the " as \". I considered trying
to make the resultSet value return as plain text instead of JSON (I'm
assuming I can do that somehow) but I decided before I went too far down
the wrong rabbit hole, I would ask for help.

Can someone help point me in a good direction? I don't mind doing a lot
of web digging, I just don't really know what I need to search for to do
the digging.

Thanks.


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