r/IBMi

The IBM docs say that "In an ANSI-compliant database, Select cursors are update cursors by default. An update cursor is a cursor that can be used to modify data."

This really surprises me. Why would a SELECT cursor be an update cursor by default? I do note that earlier in the same doc, it mentions that FOR READ ONLY is usually unnecessary for SELECT statements, since they are a read-only operation. But the sentence above confounds me.

Hello Everyone, I have been facing a weird issue with one of the programs I'm working with. Kindly read the context below and any thoughts around this would be of great help.

I have a payment processing module which calls a series of programs each program gets the data in a data structure, the data gets modified and updated in each program and the payments get posted. The program is called in both batch and interactive processes.

I have made changes to one of the programs being called in the process, I have by putting the program in debug, tested it by compiling in QTEMP, and my outcome looks good. When I compile the same source in my environment libraries and run it without the module kept in debug, the outcome doesn't look the same, it's the original behaviour. I have made sure there are no other objects of the same program in any of the libraries, kept only one object, verified the library list of the job run, checked if there was any activation group relevance, nothing worked. But when I put the program in debug and run it, it WORKS. It's so weird for me, I haven't seen such behaviour before.

Pgm 1 calls Pgm 2,3,...8. I made changes to Pgm 4 for example. They are called with CALL opcode one by one. This is how the call stack is.

Please let me know if anyone has faced a similar issue or any attribute which will help me to identify what is causing this.

I received about 25 Flash Security Bulletins for IBM i last night around 7pm EST.

Some of them appear to be similar to others I received in the last few weeks, but they all claim to have just been published on 8/11.

As I was making this post I got 6 more today.

I'm subscribed to notifications for IBM i, ACS, and RDi. My boss also gets them but he has received only 1 in the last 24 hours.

Did IBM re-release a bunch of recent CVEs? Have there actually been that many in the last 24 hours?

Thanks

We recently converted a real IBM i RPG program from fixed format to free format without changing the business logic or outputs.

The program had originally been generated by AS/SET, so a normal conversion approach wasn’t enough. We modified the open-source JCRCMDS conversion tooling to recognise the AS/SET patterns, which got us to about 99.9% automated conversion. The remaining cases were just a small set of exceptions to review manually.

Maintainability Index went from 80.25 to 85.70.

What interested me more than the number was how much easier the code was to follow afterwards. The logic hadn’t changed — but you were no longer spending effort decoding fixed-format column rules while trying to understand the program.

We’ve seen something similar with complexity. On a separate 1,600-line RPG program with 27 subroutines, one subroutine had a cyclomatic complexity of 34 while the other 26 were much lower.

That’s what I keep coming back to: legacy risk often isn’t spread evenly across a program. It can be concentrated in a very small part of it.

Do you actually measure complexity/maintainability in your RPG estate, or do you mainly rely on experience and knowing which programs “feel” risky?

Hey, i updated my ACS and now I have an issue that I get the login popup everytime i try to do smth.
Opening a new 5250-Emulator, Run SQL Script, IFS, downloading a file from IFS.
In System configuration in the Connection Tab I selected the Default User name used, once per System Option but it seems not to work. What is weird is that the popup uses the Default user I entered there, so ACS checks this options and uses that name, but it seems not to restore the successfull login.
Does someone know what file it uses to store the login? My guess is stores it in a file but checks another one. Or does someone had the same issue and could tell me how to solve it.
I am a bit worried that I will delete some configurations and settings, when I uninstall the ACS.

I updated ACS like I always did:
I emptied the folder with the old ACS and unzipped the new files in it,
go into Windows_application and execute install_acs_64_allusers.js

Normally that does it. there were no changes for me for some years when updating the ACS.

Thanks for the help.