Sorry – not the intended interpretation. I think I was (trying to be) sardonic, or ironic, or one of those type of things. Doesn’t come across well in hurried print.

We seem to agree on the absence of reality in the whole thread. of course there *may* be good reasons to do all kinds of stuff, but a simple enquiry for number of records is best met with the tools that the system has.

Still, onward to better things…

.

Not my choice.
This was the choice of the person asking the question and writing the program.
if the program is going to do more processing with that file/member it make sense.

Phil

I still have a problem knowing why you would possibly want to use RPG, and incur the overhead of the Database opening a file when a rtvobjd does the job – even if you called it from within rpg, it must surely be less resource intensive..

Ah well – not my concern..

.

Femp1 if e k disk usropn extmbr(E1)
F infds(aaa)
DE1 s 5a inz(‘EMP12′) —>pf member name
Daaa ds
Drecordno 156 159b 0
C open emp1
C recordno dsply
C close emp1
C eval *inlr = *on

A few changes to your program are requested to get the number of records in a member.
1. F spec keyword USROPN .. file will not open until you request it
2. F spec keyword EXTMBR( MBRNAME’) identifies specific member to use
3. D spec
D MBRNAME 10 INZ( ‘MYMEM’ ) <– this should be the member neame
4. C spec Open filename <– this should be the file name
5. then you can use the binary field thats in the IFSDS to get the number of records in the member.

Phil

Well, if you’rre determined, you need an RPG program which has

Open file
loop:
read record
If last record, exit
else
add 1 to count

go to loop

It’s pretty much the same in any language – only the syntax differs. Some languages make it more opaque than others.
IBM i and its rich instruction set gives you more choice than other machines.

Oh – in case the file has a hundred million records or so – common on this box – it’s still quicker to ask the operating system – it KNOWS what records are in a file – that’s its job – that’s what we bought it for.

‘A million dollars of computer and you have to add up the records in a file…. ‘

.

You don’t need to be concerned about it for this thread. Yorkshireman is right.

But for anyone who reads information like this in the future, it should always be clear that there are differences between files and members of files. This thread is going to be around for a long time. It needs to be noted that a direct RTVMBRD command will not always give the complete answer if the question is “How many records are in this file?” The RTVMBRD command is ‘Retrieve Member Description’ and it retrieves information about a “member” of a file, not about a “file”.

Eventually, that will be important to you. But not today.

Tom