RE: Entry Parameters

[Alan Campin <Alan.Campin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim, if you look at the command language, you will see that it only lets you
define a value as *DEC, i.e. a packed value. To use a command, you will need
to change your parameters to packed decimal. Commands do not support zoned
decimal. That is why your program is still blowing up. 
You are passing packed decimal data to a field defined in your program as
zoned. 

The command language allows you to specify the type, size and precision of a
value but you are still responsible for making sure that the value match
between the command and the program. 

ILE partially solves this problem with prototypes but ILE does not apply to
the OPM. They still use the trust me method.

Since the AS/400 is a packed decimal machine, everything should be defined
where possible as packed decimal. This is the most efficient type for the
AS/400 to handle. The only time I ever use a zoned value is in a data
structure to split a numeric value apart.  

If there was some reason you needed to split an incoming parameter apart or
load into a zoned value, the following works fine. 

d ZonedValue    s              6s 0
d InPackedValue s              7s 0
  
c           *ENTRY            PLIST
c           ZonedValue        PARM              InPackedValue

The program will receive the value in packed and then move to ZonedValue as
soon as the program receives control.

Hope this helps. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Langston [mailto:jlangston@conexfreight.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 9:10 AM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Entry Parameters


Hmm... Okay, it was my assumption that when passing variables
to an RPGLE program from the command line with parameters,
that the system checked the data types of the parameters to make
sure they were the same, I guess not.  Which is good in this
case.

And, yes, I understand why it works, but didn't think to try it
given my experience with parameter types in other things.  Yes,
negative numbers could be a pain, but I actually have the list
written down as to what symbol is what negative number.  It is
actually not that hard to remember.  } is 0, J is 1 and it goes to
R is 9.  Capital J and Capital R.

Okay, this is doable, although I could not expect my users to
know how to put in a negative number, in this case it doesn't
matter since there will never be a negative number for the
parameters.

Er, or there should never be a negative number <g>

Hmm... this being the case, it seems that any number passed as
a parameter to an RPG program will always have to be passed
as a character?  I attempted to do a CMD for the program, but
it failed with same error, but at that point it is possible that I had
the variables defined differently that 15P 2.

Regards,

Jim Langston

Simon Coulter wrote:

> Hello Jim,
>
> Despite Buck's very well explained append, because you are expecting Zoned
Decimal values you
> can simply invoke the program with:
>
>  CALL PGM(JIMCONEX/CHGAPOPEN) PARM('51' '990110' '51' '000120')
>
> Note the 'quotation' marks -- yeah, I know they're apostrophes.
> Note that no 'conversions' are neccessary.  The character values
'magically' become numbers.
>
> Why does this work?
>
> Regards,
> Simon Coulter.

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