Distribute Data (DSTDTA)

Back inthe dimmn distant mists of time... I worked for a large Software House and was tasked with writing an tool to enable us to package up programs and other objects and distribute them around any given network. DSTOBJ was born. Over teh years I've rewritten this concept a number of times and its current (very lovely) incarnation uses the PROJEX4I *EGG* processes. CRTEGG, DSPEGG, RSTEGG, WRKEGG - just think of EGGS as the IBMi equivalent of ZIP files containing anything you like and really easy to email around to anyone you like and simple to upload/restore.

But I digress....

Q: I dont want to send THINGS from the system i just want to package up DATA and send it. How can I do that?

A: Use the DSTDTA command you big Ninny!

Distribute Data does exactly that.... it is a hugely flexible command that allows you send all the data in a file or a range of data (based on a very simple SQL selection string). This data can be encapsulated as a flat *TXT file, a *CSV, *XML, *HTML and a few more in the pipeline - namely PDF and XLS.

                            Distribute Data   (DSTDTA)                         
                                                                               
 Type choices, press Enter.                                                    
                                                                               
 File to be distributed . . . . .                 File Name                    
   Library  . . . . . . . . . . .     *LIBL       Name, *LIBL, *CURLIB         
 Member Name  . . . . . . . . . .   *FIRST        Name, *FIRST                 
 How much data is going?  . . . .   *ALL          *ALL, *SQL                   
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                                                               
 F3=Exit   F4=Prompt   F5=Refresh   F10=Additional parameters   F12=Cancel     
 F13=How to use this display        F24=More keys                              
                                                                                                                                                              

When it creates this subset of data you can choose to have it placed in the IFS ready for manual distribution or (my favorite) have it attached to an email and sent straight to your dekstop. Here's an example of me sending a copy of the user definitions table to my email:

so the email looks like this when it gets to me a few seconds later: