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Folks, there's a lot happening in the IBM i world these
days, and I'm very excited about it. Here are some upcoming events I
want to tell you about:
On February 11, I'll be driving down to St. Louis to speak for
the Gateway400 user's group.
That's going to be a blast! I made it down there about two years ago and
really enjoyed it. If you're located in the greater St. Louis area,
check it out--you won't be sorry!
On March 16, I'll be joining an Expert Panel at the WMCPA
Spring Conference here in Wisconsin. I recently spoke at a WMCPA meeting
and made a video. The video talks about the people at WMCPA (which is
the local user group where I live) as well as their fantastic spring
conference.
Click here for my
video!
Click here for the WMCPA website, with
full details about the conference.
On March 23-25, the awesome RPG & DB2 Summit
conference will be held in Fort Worth, TX. The Summit will feature
lots of material on RPG, SQL, PHP, and other technologies important to
IBM i programmers. This is such a great event, with the best speakers in
the world, it's hard for me to even put it into words! The staff of RPG
& DB2 Summit has graciously agreed to work with me on more podcasts for
this newsletter. Check out the podcast article, below!
I'll try to keep a list of all of my upcoming events on my website, in case I don't
have a chance to post them here. If you see me at any of these events,
please say hi.
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APIs by
Example: Work with LAN Printers Command
By
Carsten
Flensburg
In the October
22, 2009, APIs by Example column, I present a homegrown version of
the Additional Message Information panel. This panel lets you display
and optionally reply to a message residing in a message queue, based on
the qualified name of the message queue and the message key identifying
the specific message to display. The usefulness of such a facility is
prompted by the ability of some jobs and print APIs that return the name
of the message queue assigned to a job or printer as well as the message
key when the job or printer is currently waiting for a reply to a
message.
Today, I present an example of how to use one of the aforementioned
APIs in collaboration with my Additional Message Information panel,
thereby providing a functionality similar to the one offered by many
native IBM Job and Writer CL commands' list panels, including an option
7=Display message. Because I currently have no access to a system at
release 6.1, which is required to take advantage of the Message wait
message key information added to some of the Job APIs at that
release, I decided to create a utility based on one of the Writer APIs,
which for some time now has included this information. Say hello to the
Work with LAN Writer (WRKLANWTR) command.
*Read
More...
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Why Not Video
Documentation?
By
Scott
Klement
Programmers are notorious for their dislike of
documenting code. (I'm no exception! Comments in code aren't too bad,
but writing documentation for users?!) Nonetheless, we all have
to do it, right? I know that in our shop, we need to create "run books"
that explain step-by-step how a user is to perform a particular task,
such as entering an order or adding a customer.
Written documentation works OK for plain-text screens. But it never
works as well as demonstrating the process for the user, where he can
see the screens as I'm typing the commands. With GUI software, being
able to see the actual screens is even more important. For example,
written software that has instructions like "click the doo-hickey that
looks like a curly arrow" can be hard to follow.
Therefore, I'm proclaiming that the age of video documentation has
officially begun! With video documentation, you can easily create a
step-by-step tutorial for your users and show them exactly what the
screens look like, and they can watch it anytime. Best of all, it's
free!
*Read
More...
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| System i
Developer |
Join the leading RPG & DB2 minds at the RPG & DB2 Summit this March for three days
of intense education and personalized advice on RPG IV, SQL, DB2,
RSE, PHP, RPG & the Web and more. Check out this partial list of sessions from top gurus Susan Gantner, Jon Paris, Skip Marchesani, Paul Tuohy,
Scott Klement and others, delivered in a highly interactive,
fun environment. Register by Feb 12 for just $995 - save
$300!
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Locking
Cells in HSSF
By
Scott
Klement
Q: We've been using your "Excel from RPG"
stuff, and love it. But I've been unable to figure out a way to lock
cells in a spreadsheet with POI! We're generating a form in which users
can fill in some fields, but we don't want them to change others. How
can we lock the cells against changes?
A: Locking cells in HSSF is easier than you might think. You
first have to protect the sheet by calling the protectSheet() method of
the HSSFSheet class and assigning a password that will be needed to
unlock the sheet from within Excel. Once you've done that, call the
setLocked() method for each cell style used in the sheet. For the cells
you want to be locked, you have to create separate cell styles from the
ones for the cells you want unlocked.
*Read
More...
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Podcast: MySQL:
Blessing or Heresy?
By Scott
Klement,
Susan
Gantner, and
Paul Tuohy
Last year, I published several special RPG &
DB2 Summit podcasts in which experts from the RPG & DB2 Summit
conference discussed some of the hot issues that today's IBM i
programmers face. Because these podcasts were very popular, we've
decided to do it again!
This podcast features Paul Tuohy interviewing Susan Gantner about
using MySQL on i. Since we have our familiar integrated DB2 database,
why would we ever want to use MySQL on i? To the IBM i faithful, is
MySQL a blessing, or is it heresy?
*Listen
to the podcast...
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