Comments on: Opening a physical/member file on a Windows Systems

By: teandy

teandy — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:48:07 +0000

Use CPYTOIMPF to copy the file to the IFS. Then you can drag it to your desktop and open it in excel, notepad, etc…

By: tomliotta

tomliotta — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:45:35 +0000

Even if you could open a physical database file on an AS/400 from Windows, you wouldn’t be able to make any more sense of it than you could if you opened a Windows SQL Server file using Windows Notepad. Notepad knows how to read the bytes, but it doesn’t have the first clue about how to make sense of them.

You can’t make sense of a Windows image file with Notepad. You can’t make sense of a Windows audio file with Notepad. Opening a file and reading its bytes is useless.

You must use an appropriate client for everything except basic text. And even then the byte encoding scheme will be critical.

Use the right client.

Tom

By: jgsnsbt

jgsnsbt — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 04:01:26 +0000

To costevet:
In fact, You can open a file-member(!) using Explorer and dragging it into Notepad, at least on V5R3. It just won’t do you any good since it’s all in EBCDIC. I was surprised too.

If You need usable data in your pc-app, you have to access the AS400-data with SQL or at least with the dummy Client Access download tool. Maybe you can try the trick to write your own app and associate the windows-extension .mbr with this application to do the query and data conversion. Then you just might open the file of type mbr and have your data displayed readable.

By: costevet

costevet — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 10:48:06 +0000

You cannot “open” an i5 file from Windows explorer. Just as you cannot open an Oracle table from Windows. You have to use a tool such as iNavigator to make a database connection to submit SQL statements. ODBC and client access are two ways of making the connection. In any event, the server job on the i5 will open the file and send a result set to the client.