Did you know Synon 2E has aFull Screen Mode?

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: Advantage: CA: etc also has the ability for a user to see more on selected screens.  Here are a couple that might be of interest. 

Action Diagram Expanded vs Normal view.

Most developers could survive with this as virtually all worth their salt will know every option and command key off the top of their head anyhow.

A lesser-known scenario and also a bit harder to remember all the options, is the ability to extend the records shown when viewing a model list. 

Personally, I don't have this one switched on but kudos to anyone out there that does!

So how do you set these values?

From the main Services Menu take option 11 for Edit model profile (YEDTMDLPRF) or as the menu implies, execute the command.  Then set the options accordingly.

You're welcome.
Thanks for reading.
Lee.

They say a picture is a 1000 words!

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.

Lee.

Understanding CONstant usages in 2e.

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 scan the generated source, but then what about all the genuine field names or comments.

Back with 2E!  When generating the source, it somehow lets the generator knows about them and adds them into the code (inline) or as part of a data structure.  Take a look at the bottom of a source listing if you don't believe me.

Here is a sample function using some constants.  Note the 'Create Flatfile' call is passing in 'FLAT FILE CoNsTANT' as CON.

And here are the relevant code snippets of generated source i.e. The moves.

Followed by the structure of CON values at the bottom.  Note: Sometimes the CON is generated 'inline' at the point of the MOVE.

Anyhow, in order for the CON values to be consistently applied, they must be in the 2E model data files somewhere, with the theory being we should also be able to query them.  As CON can only be applied via action diagram text, let's start by looking there in the YMSGACTRFP file.

It looks like we have some constants referred to in field ELMTTL ** (Element Title - highlighted RED).  This could be a good start but there are some obvious limitations. Whilst it looks like it covers basic *MOVE and *CONCAT field assignments, when we have hardcoded values going into a function call (PURPLE), the CON value isn't reflected in the ELMTTL field.  

**It would appear that the ELMTTL data is used for the AD layout.  Perhaps I will expand more on the complexities of this data in a future post!!!

However, it looks like 2E maintains a surrogate reference for each unique CON value used in the AD regardless of AD syntax used.  (GREEN)

This is awesome, but how are these linked via the function AD?  

To do this, let's take a gander at a subset of the 2E files in the model library. The one highlighted below looks like it could be useful and most likely, a file most dev's didn't even realise existed.  Hands up who has explored the intricacies of the model schema.

What does the data look like in the table?

Bingo, we have our constants.  

Luckily ours are at the bottom of the file :-) for easier blog documentation.  Diving deeper, we have now confirmed that 2E maintains a surrogate reference for each unique CON value and if we refer back to the YMSGACTRFP image above, these are all highlighted in the GREEN section.

So, all that is left for us to do is to identify the CON values we want to analyse, work out what functions they are linked to via the AD code and some pretty cool impact analysis is before us.

Here is a sample SQL retrieving the many different usages of the term 'constant'.  As CON is only ever associated with field @@SUB3, the query is quite straight forward.

Ensuring you have the correct library list.

SELECT DISTINCT b.@@msg, c.OBJNME, b.@@SUB3, a.CON, c.OBJOWN    

FROM YCONDTARFP a LEFT JOIN YMSGACTRFP b ON a.@@CON = 

b.@@SUB3 LEFT JOIN YMDLOBJRFP c on b.@@MSG = c.@@OBJ  

WHERE UPPER(a.CON) LIKE '%CONSTANT%' AND c.CUROBJ = 'Y'                       

This query returns unique records for each of the functions using CON context with the word 'constant', the UPPER() function ensures we don't miss any based-on case differences.  The rest of the query does a basic join to return some additional fields from YMDLOBJRFP (This is the *ALLOBJ or *A model list).  You can add to this query or tidy up names and formatting however you like.

I hope that this helps someone.

Thanks for reading.
Lee.

Exploring 2E messages via SQL (Update)

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                                             
LEFT JOIN YMSGSECRFP b ON a.@@MSG = b.@@MSG                   
WHERE UPPER(a.MSG) like '%KD33%' OR                           
UPPER(a.TYPOPT) LIKE '%KD33%' OR UPPER(b.SECLVL) LIKE '%KD33%'

The actual query above is checking for the message name in the 2E model, the default message text and the second level text associated with the message.

Thanks for reading and as always, interested in any feedback.

Lee.