Three As/400 Message Queue Attributes You Should Know}

Submitted by: John Andersen

The messaging system on the AS/400, iSeries and IBM i is an important system administration area that you need to understand. Messages are more or less simple ways that jobs can communicate status and errors, administrators can send important messages to signed on users and a way that the operating system communicates critical and important information like a hardware failure.

Now accessing messages in a queue is straight foward. Most people know about the work with message command WRKMSG and display messages command. But there are three key configurations details or attributes, you should know about that can make seeing and handling messages on your system easier.

To pull up the attributes for a given message queue, use the display messages command DSPMSG to list all of your messages in the message queue then press the F22 key to bring up the display list details screen. This screen shows all of the attributes that we will cover including the delivery method, program and severity fields.

Delivery is the way in which you will be notified of new messages arriving on the queue. The valid options for this attribute are notify, break and hold. Notify is the default, and when a new message arrives in the queue the message is put into the queue and you will be notified of it by receiving the message waiting indicator in the bottom left of the screen.

Setting the delivery method to break will interrupt what you are doing on the screen and display the message regardless if it requires a reply or not. Lastly using a method of hold does not notify you with the message waiting indicator on the screen and the message simply waits on the queue after arrival and you have to check the message queue to see the new message.

Now there can be instances where it is useful to change your workstation queue delivery method to break. Most often programmers seem to like this the most because if they submit a job compile t batch or job errors they receive the message notification on the screen instead of having to track it down. Ultimately it saves you a few key strokes.

I dont like to use the break delivery method since it can be annoying to see every silly little status message, important or not, which is why if you decide to use this field then you should set it in conjunction with the severity code.

The program field, also known as the message handling program, allow you to create specify a program to respond to an error message or take some other sort of corrective action. This is generally an area utilized by programmers for specific purposes or to handle situations with custom programs.

The severity code works in conjunction with the delivery method to determine whether or not to break in and interrupt your screen depending on the severity of the message that arrives on the message queue. For instance the QSYSOPR message queue severity code defaults to level 40, so if a message of 40 or higher arrives on the queue and the method is set for break you will be interrupted with the message on your screen.

About the Author: The best way to handle AS/400, iSeries and IBM i messages can be found in John Andersens

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