If there’s one common theme among IBM i power users, it’s that they all love playing with spreadsheets! Fortunately, Valence makes it easy to cater to this love. RPG developers simply feed an SQL statement to vvOut_execSQLtoSS() or vvOut_execSQLtoCSV(), and the results are automatically downloaded into an Excel-compatible spreadsheet file. But what about going the other direction? What if users could fiddle with downloaded spreadsheet data and then upload the massaged information to an RPG program that could validate the data and plug it into a physical file?...Learn More

REST-based web service, with the other end being the “consumer” of said service. Consider this scenario:  You want to give a VIP customer the ability to have their system automatically contact your system to obtain real-time shipment status updates for specific orders being fulfilled by your company.  And as luck would have it, you’ve already done the legwork to create an order inquiry Valence app on your system, complete with an RPG program that provides the necessary data for these shipments in JSON format.  So with...Learn More

With the recent introduction of Polish as our ninth spoken language translation in the Valence Portal, developers now have yet another option for supporting multilingual installations running on IBM i. Even if your company does not currently have a multilingual user base, if it may someday become multilingual as a result of international acquisitions or mergers, there are some simple steps you can take in your app development today to make the process of supporting multiple languages on your Valence applications down the road relatively simple. The key to multilingual support in...Learn More

Ever wished you could save and test your front-end development work locally, on your own PC or laptop, then push it to your IBM i only when it’s ready for user testing or production? Turns out this is indeed something you can do! Using this process, the changes you make during development are completely local to your PC, thereby not affecting any deployed Valence app in the interim. This approach is also particularly handy when you’re developing apps with Sencha Architect, as the volume of...Learn More

Old UI habits die hard!  You may have developed some of the most beautifully functional and user-friendly Valence apps for your company, but the green screen legacy can still be hard to overcome. So long as your company’s operations require at least some 5250 programs to be used — as is typical for IBM i sites that have been around for a while — then persuading users to flip from Client Access over to their web browser to do, say, a quick...Learn More

Imagine this scenario:  You’ve developed and deployed a beautiful Valence-based customer order entry app to replace your company’s former green screen program.  Your customer service users can now easily launch the app to initiate new orders, quickly fill out the mandatory header fields and enter item details for the order.  All is well! But then one day, while in the middle of entering an exceptionally large order, one of your users gets distracted and inadvertently closes the order entry app before hitting Save.  Poof!  All their...Learn More

Note to Valence 5.* developers: Please reference the Valence 5 User Guide for more recent information on customizing your Valence 5 portal instance. Out of the box, the web portal included with Valence Framework 4.0 provides a great foundation for building up your repository of IBM i-based web and mobile apps.  But many developers quickly find they want to take things a step further and give the portal a look and feel that is more reflective of their corporate identity.  Simple aesthetic tweaks,...Learn More