Using Open Access to Extend Your RPG Code
Learn how to use Open Access to simplify the way an RPG program works with something complex like a web service.
Open Access is intended to allow RPG programmers to use I/O opcodes to work with anything, not just *FILE objects, using an "Open Access handler". For example, here is the RPG coding to read an Open Access file whose handler works with IFS files.
path = '/home/blm/myfile.txt';open ifsfile;
read ifsfile;
dow not %eof;
...
read ifsfile;
enddo;
The first part of the session will introduce the basic concepts of Open Access: what it is, and what it is not. I will talk about how Open Access can be used to modernize existing applications and how Open Access can simplify the way you write new applications to work with new resources and devices.
The second part will show how to write an Open Access handler to work with a web service. I will show the various stages of development starting from a trivial "one-liner" that always returns the same result, to a fully-functional handler that can be used by an Open Access file to access any or all the data returned by the web service.
By the end of the session, I hope that you will see that the extra effort to write an Open Access handler is more than made up by the ease of use for the RPG programs that use the Open Access file.
BIOGRAPHY:
Barbara Morris is the lead developer for the RPG compiler in the IBM Toronto Lab. She has been working on the RPG compilers since she started at IBM in 1989 after receiving a Computing Science degree from the University of Alberta.
The first enhancement she developed was the ENDIF/ENDDO opcodes for RPG/400 in V2R1. Some of her more recent enhancements were Open Access: RPG Edition in 6.1 and the ability to sort and search data structure arrays in 7.1. Some of the other notable enhancements that she developed for RPG include subprocedures, qualified data structures, call-interaction with Java, and V5R4's native XML processing op-codes.
Barbara is a regular participant in several online RPG forums, and has published many articles about RPG
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