I have finished reading another book on RPG, “RPG II And RPG III Structured Programming” by Nancy Stern, Robert A. Stern, Alden Sager, James Cooper and added a great deal of material to my notes. Now I am turning my attention to BABY/400 to get some practice writing RPG programs. Over the weekend I finally managed to compile and run a program from the Judy Yaeger book “Programming In RPG/400“. I had considerable difficulty accomplishing this task and had to solve many technical problems.
The first problem was getting the RPG compiler to find my externally described data file. I had to post some messages on newsgroups about this and finally learned that I needed to add my library to the library list. Fortunately, I have the book “AS/400 Control Language Guide” by Brian Fu which has a chapter on the Library and Library List. The command to add a library to the library list is ADDLIBLE QMYLIB *FIRST. Then I had to make it the current library before attempting to compile my program using the command CHGCURLIB CURLIB(QMYLIB).
After fixing several problems with my Data Description Specifications and RPG source code I finally got my program to compile successfully! Then I figured out how to call my program which generated a report. I’m cheating by viewing the files directly in a text editor rather than going through the menus in BABY/400 to view the printer output.
Later on I may add a how to section to my web site on the BABY/400 because there is absolutely no information on this rare software available on the Internet. So I have had to really struggle to figure out how to do RPG development on the BABY/400. If I put my notes on my web site it will become the only source of information that anyone else can refer to. I know a lot of local companies still use an AS/400 and have not upgraded to an System i5 IBM.
