Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill » DSPOSRLS

A better way to display ad-hoc messages

Paul — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:04:32 +0000

When debugging – and when developing quick and dirty utilities – I often resort to the DSPLY opcode. It isn’t pretty, but it puts information onto the screen without having to bother with DDS. There is a better way.

Display Long Text (QUILNGTX) API displays a pop-up window containing the string of text passed to it. You can even add a title to the window by passing a Message ID and (optionally) a qualified message file name.

This API has been around for a while, but it’s new to me and, after playing around with it a bit, I have now updated the DSPOSRLS utility to take advantage of it.

Pretty, isn’t it?

For the sake of completeness, I should probably add a message to a message file for this so that I can display a window title. For the sake of laziness, that’s something for the future.

Documentation!

Paul — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 19:28:33 +0000

Just a quick note to mention that I have updated the project pages for DSPOSRLS and DSPPGMLCK so that they now include some halfway useful compile and usage instructions. I have also committed some slightly improved README files for both of these utilities.

DSPOSRLS: Display Operating System Release

Paul — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 20:33:31 +0000

One of the surprisingly non-inuitive parts of the IBM i is that there is no easy way to identify what OS release your machine is on. Well, not if you don’t have enough authority to use DSPPTF.

A common approach is to use DSPDTAARA QSS1MRI which works, but isn’t officially supported. So this approach could stop working at any point and without notice.

The officially supported method is to use the QSZRTVPR (Retrieve Product Information) API. So I did.

DSPOSRLS is a simple command that retrieves and displays the current OS release level. I have posted the source on GitHub so feel free to browse or download it from there.