Thursday, February 14, 2008

cwbx help files

Well, I wrote an application that I was getting the objectdisposed exception in, and that was using IBMs .net provider to talk to the as400, call a stored proc which called a program.

Unfortunately, that wasn't fast enough for me, so I started searching around for help on calling programs directly. I found a dll, that you can reference in your project, which will give you access to calling 400 programs directly. This opens up a whole new world because you can start passing complex types back and forth (suposedly, I haven't tried this myself). The downside, is that there is only one real other blog that actually has info on it.
http://www.netsplore.com/PublicPortal/blog.aspx?EntryID=13

And the program works great. However, I needed to know what some of the values mean, because even though this method is faster than the .net provider, i'm still slower than running websphere for the same calls.

It took some reasearch, but for all you out there, who need to know, you can find the cwbx.dll help files in the following directory on your windows system:

C:\Program Files\IBM\Client Access\Mri2924\cwbx.hlp

that last directory having to do something with the version of your client access.....

This basically a help file on what all the values, types, methods, objects, etc mean for that dll.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This post has been a big help in pointing me in the right direction. I am building a front-end e-commerce site on a windows server using the client's backend as400 product database. The cwbx dll seems to be the way to communicate between the 2 servers; now I am researching how to use it. -Jack

Mike said...

Glad to hear that this is a help. The one thing that I did notice about using the cwbx.dll is that it runs on the 400 in interactive mode. That means, when I had 5 open connections with calls into the 400, only one of those would actually be Run mode at a time, the others would be in TIMW status etc.

If you have the money, etc, and need even better performance, try looking at ASNA Datagate to make program calls. I've since switched to that and it works great as well.