IBM iSeries Frontend Development

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the IBM i5 series emulator (looks like this poop)

My company uses this religiously and there is no Biz logi开发者_StackOverflowc in it so anytime somone in our finance dpt makes a human error it accepts it and adds it to the database. Not to mention its ugly, hard to use, not intuitive, etc....

I would like to create a frontend for this interface so that we can control the logic before its submitted to the system (we dont control the system itself) so in effect I need to make my own emulator app.

However I cant seem to find any information on how to interface with the i series, namely login, send commands, and view or gather data from the screens it would normally send back.

Any suggestions?

The problem is not the iSeries but the software package your company is running on it.

There ARE advantages to use green screens: it's fast and it's almost unbeatable at data entry, provided you get used to it.

But to answer your question, the iSeries is a J2EE enabled machine: a HTTP server comes installed and depending of the version of the iSeries, WebSphere might be already installed, or are entitled to install it. Then you can use JT400, which is the java toolkit for the os400 containing the jdbc drivers to connect the database and the necessary classes for calling programs.

If you prefer php, there is a flavor of the Zend framework made to work on the iSeries but I never tried it.

I'd recommend that you take a look at both the Attachmate Verastream Host Integrator (VHI) and IBM's Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) products. They effectively just screen scrape the green screen terminals to allow you to pull and push data and provide macro recording and editing tools to automate the process. App integration can be achieved via web services or html/jsp/servlet programming (plus .Net for VHI and EJB's for HATS). They do come with enterprise pricing however which may be an obstacle for some. They do have free trial offerings for evaluation purposes to help determine if they are an appropriate solution to your problem.

What software packages are they using? Most programs that I use in the 5250 emulator has some business logic that error checks the data before adding it to the database. Can you get us some more information so we can direct you in a better direction.

There are vendors that sell products that screen-scrape the 5250 data stream and produces a web front-end. Or you can write your own front-end in the language of your choice and just do SQL calls to the database.

THere's got to be some source code. Start by looking at the menu and menu option your users are accessing and figure that's running behind them.

Use command STRPDM to look for source code - look in different libraries (they are like folders)

You might have source code in a "member" called something like xxxMNUSRC xxxRPGSRC (rpg program source) or xxxCLSRC (cl programs), xxxDDSSRC (display/screen source, physical/logical file source)

Objects a "compiled" objects such as files (tables), screens, priter files (reports)

Stay away from Qxxx and #xxx libraries - those are system libraries.

http://systeminetwork.com/ is a good resource for iSeries related questions.