IBM i > Developer > RPG

RPG and Community

You are potentially the piece we need

 

There's something special about community, whether it be chatting with your neighbor in your driveway or chatting with a new name on an online forum. I just got back from the WMCPA conference in Wisconsin and had a great time being part of their community. You see, what's funny is that I only see some of those people once a year yet I feel like I know so much about them because we chat on midrange.com, see each other's updates on Facebook, reference each other on LinkedIn or e-mail about the open-source code on my Web site.

The virtual aspect of community is what I want to address here. Being in community with one another likely means something different to everyone, but to me it means having relationship and helping people-whether they be friends or yet-to-be friends.

Because many miles often separate online community, one of the simplest ways we can help each other is with code contributions. For example, recently I was working on a project for a customer that I found others on midrange.com also needed. In particular, I was creating a quick, easy way to convert a CGIDEV2 html stream to a PDF so it could be e-mailed. Now, the code required to pull this off is fairly insignificant, but the time it may have taken someone else to put together the same solution might have been much more if they didn't have my background with RPG and Java.

HTML2PDF4i

Every good project deserves a name, so I've given this one HTML2PDF4i (HTML to PDF for IBM i) and, yes, that is the best I could come up with. Download HTML2PDF4i from my site.

Let's look at this code for some basic syntax for how simple we could make it for somebody to use such a tool:

HTML2PDF4i('/ifs/folder/file.html': '/ifs/folder/file.pdf': errStr);

It's really quite easy--make a simple call to a program named HTML2PDF4I with the HTML file you wish to convert, the location where you want the new PDF file to be located, and a string variable to receive back errors if any should occur. I've learned that one of the most important aspects in releasing code to open source with your name on it is to make it easy to use and implement. Not only will an easy-to-use API allow for fewer questions via e-mail, but it'll also bolster adoption. Who wants to use an open-source tool that doesn't seem like a good fit within the first perusal? This is called "hiding implementation details."

 

Tweet