Note: This month’s tip is an update to a blog post originally made a few years ago, when integrated record locking functionality was first incorporated into the Valence RPG toolkit (in version 3.2.20130912.0). When developing apps in which users will be editing the contents of an order or master table record, you have to consider the possibility that...Read More
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...Read More
Normally the paths associated with Valence apps are hard-coded to specific values that never change. The users clicks on the app and the Valence Portal directs them to a specific IFS path or web page. But what if you had a special use case where you wanted to alter the IFS path or URL based...Read More
As you create and deploy more Valence apps within your organization, logging in to the Valence Portal becomes more of a daily routine for your IBM i users. In such cases, setting up a global auto-start tab (as done in Portal Admin > Settings > Session Options > Application to autostart) can be a handy...Read 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...Read More
As you roll out more and more Valence apps to your IBM i users, it’s only a matter of time before you receive a call from someone claiming a program didn’t respond with the expected data, or took too long to respond. Or perhaps it didn’t respond at all! Of course, getting pertinent cause-and-effect details from users in...Read 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...Read 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...Read More
As your repository of Valence apps grows, you may soon find occasion where you’d like to “spawn” one app from another in the Valence Portal. For example, you may have a simple inventory lookup app that you could launch whenever someone clicks on a line on a customer order, passing in the corresponding product number...Read More
As you develop and deploy new web or mobile apps for your Valence users on IBM i, inevitably you will run into situations where you’re tempted to hard-code global values into your program to control the behavior of your app. For instance, perhaps you have a situation where you want to default a date field value out by...Read More
