Synon 2E and Plex Emporium by Lee Dare (A developer blog)

Long time IBMi users typically work with an expanded WRKACTJOB screen shortly after learning all the command keys that are of use.  As a junior developer (back in the early nineties), I was always in awe of the seniors around me who didn't need to toggle through the command key options whilst managing the jobs running in the system. As always though, once you had learnt the system you could press F21 to remove the subfile options and command key text, thus freeing up more room for the critical data on these somewhat limited 5250 displays.  If I remember rightly, the command key used to bring up a window and you could chose between Basic (might have been intermediate) and Advanced mode.  This has long since been removed from the o/s and the command key merely acts as a toggle nowadays.  The reward of course was the ability to see more of your processes and interactive sessions. Here is my current 'Pro' setup lol. Synon aka 2e with various prefixes, Cool: Allfusion: Ad...

A thousand?........... In this instance it is more like tens of thousands. Anyhow, a colleague was talking about tag clouds the other day and it got me thinking. "What would this blogs labels look like in a tag cloud?" So......... I popped online and googled for a tag cloud generator and discovered this site that looked pretty good. https://simplewordcloud.com/ or you can click here:   Simple Word Cloud Generator After some Excel wizardry to generate the source data. Roughly translated as a screen scrape, removing some spaces, duplicating entries relative to the blog usage count, copying out the formatted data etc. I excitedly 'cut n pasted' it into the input field on the website and clicked the button. Results as below. Thanks for reading the Synon 2E and Plex  Emporium  by Lee Dare (A developer blog) .  Lee.

UPDATE: 06/12/2025 - Linked to a summary post dedicated to deep dive long form posts. https://leedare-plex2e.blogspot.com/2025/12/synon-2e-technical-deep-dives.html One of my colleagues was trying to track down some (potentially) hardcoded string values/literals.  She had already used the SQL queries in one of my previous posts to narrow down the usages inside messages, however, she was also concerned that there might be some underlying hardcoding via CND and more specifically via CON values. As a side, IMHO there should be next to no CON usages in a well architected model apart from, values like *BLANK, 0.00 and some tolerance towards values like 12 (months), 52 (weeks), 365 (days), 100 (percentage).  I'd even accept 1,2,3, 9999999 etc. I draw the line at meaningful literals that could have been scoped conditions (CND) or database values. My main reason for this is that there isn't a way (via the 2E tool interface) to check for usages of CON values.  Obviously, we can sc...

UPDATE: 06/12/2025 - Added a summary link post to aggregate these types of posts. https://leedare-plex2e.blogspot.com/2025/12/synon-2e-sql-and-model-files-summary.html Last year I made a small post about querying the underlying 2E files for messages, this use case came up at my current contract today and a small improvement can be made. Here is the original post for some more context. Lee Dare - Software Development Principles, Plex/2e and everything else in between.: Exploring 2E messages via SQL (leedare-plex2e.blogspot.com) In addition to the above, I recommend the SQL syntax is improved by catering for 'Mixed Case' SELECT a.@@MSG, a.MSG, a.TYPOPT, b.SECLVL                      FROM YMSGDTARFP a                               ...