Presenter: Jon Paris

Topic: Open Up Your RPG I/O Options with Special Files

This session introduces a coding technique that can greatly simplify how your RPG programs interact with modern interfaces such as web services, browsers and more. It allows you to access to these interfaces through native RPG I/O operations such as READ, WRITE, UPDATE, etc.). This support is enabled by using RPG's SPECIAL Files, a feature that has been around for years, but has received very little attention to date.

That attention is about to increase dramatically now that IBM has openly discussed plans to expand this type of support with enhancements to the RPG compiler rumoured to be coming in IBM i 7.1.

No need to wait for 7.1, though. You can gain many of the benefits of the proposed new support today by using SPECIAL Files. What kinds of things can you do? How about changing a report program to output to a browser with only a few changes to the existing code? Perhaps sending an email by simply WRITEing the data. Or processing IFS files and directories with nothing more than a READ or WRITE? Even invoke PASE functions using WRITE and getting the results back using READ!