The AS400 User Space FFD Utility

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 at 10:13 pm

AS400 Developers often have the need to find the filed file description of a file and use it in different application programs.

The traditional way to do that was to direct to an output file the command DSPFFD (Display Field File Description) and then process the results of the command.

However there is better, faster and more efficient way to do it, by using the User Space APIs.

This Utility creates a temporary User Space and calls the User Space API’s to create the FFD of the file in the user space and to navigate the results.

The Utility consists of two main programs called UUFFDR (to create the file field definitions in the user space) and UURDFDR to read the definitions in the User Space.

There are also some secondary programs and data structures which are described in the documentation Ebook.

You can download the AS/400 User Space FFD Utility from:

==> AS/400 User Space FFD Download

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The AS400 Spool File Save/Restore Utility

Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 10:16 am

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The normal AS/400 back-ups do not save the spool files. However sometimes users prefer to keep important reports for long times and they would not be happy if they were lost because of some system failure.

It would be nice to move these report to some output queue and to regularly save its content. The saved spool files could also be removed from the system, thus increasing the disk space availability.

The utilities described below allow to save and restore the spool files of the selected output queue and therefore increase the security level of the back-ups. They consists of many programs, but only two can be invoked directly by the users as follows:

Program USPSAV1. The program can be called to control the spool file save function.
Program USPRST1. The program can be called to control the restore function.

You can download the AS/400 Spool File Save/Restore Utility from:

==> AS/400 Spool File Save/Restore Utility

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The AS400 Spool Files Export Utility

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011 at 10:08 pm

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Spool files on the AS/400 cannot be transferred directly because they have a special format. Normally people use the CPYSPLF command to copy the spool file to a physical file and then they transfer the physical file.

However there is sometimes the need to import a spool file into spreadsheet applications such as Excel and the simple operations described above are not sufficient because each line is considered as a single cell of the spreadsheet.

The utility UEXPSPLF allows to split lines into separate cells and create a physical file that can be imported into the spreadsheet.

The command prompt the data in the following mask:

The user is required to specify the separator that will be used to identify the end of each column , the spool file and physical file where it should be copied.

When the data are entered, the program copies automatically the spool file to a physical file and then diplays the first page as follows:

The user can then identify the different columns, by entering the separator character at the end of each column, and then press F6 to request the production of the separated output file. This can then be easily transferred to the target machine and used to import the data into a spreadsheet.

You can download the AS/400 Spool File Export Utility from:

==> AS/400 Spool File Export Utility