Tag: legacy

FtpWebRequest: More Mainframe Adventures with DotNetCore

catrinaLeave a Comment on FtpWebRequest: More Mainframe Adventures with DotNetCore

Problem:

Our iSeries (mainframe/as400) team has figured out a way to upgrade all our forms and can easily deposit these forms into a folder on the as400.  They are looking for the fastest way to push these forms to our customers.

They ask: Is there a way I can (.NET Core Dev) retrieve their PDF statements from the mainframe (iSeries/AS400) for viewing online? The files are not exposed in Zend (the as400 webserver) but are in a specific “folder” (if you could call it that, the structure of as400 file system is different).

Thought:

Though I actively employ their Zend system to utilize my own API for querying, etc, there was not much interest in this in their team other than knowing how I was calling their programs.  They wanted this SPECIFIC folder to be accessed to retrieve statements.

I tried to propose a HTTP web service via Zend, other HTTP/PHP solutions… but in the end, I explained what I am currently doing:  utilizing my own API to accept an authentication key with parameters (in json using PHP) and convert those parameters to the parameters they need and then calling a program.  The program I call does the logic and …

Site 24×7 and JSONPath Example

catrinaLeave a Comment on Site 24×7 and JSONPath Example

We had an issue a couple of days ago where two points of failure caused some downtime and so I spent most of today revisiting all my monitors to give us as much warning as possible if one of our services fails.

One particular API I set up lives on the as400 (iSeries) and operates off of it’s ZendCore server in PHP.  I quickly scripted a page to verify:  connection between ZendCore PHP and db2, that the connection to that endpoint was in fact SSL, and on what port.

The PHP code is very simple and returns a JSON string that looks like this:

{
    "AS400CONNECTION": true,
    "SSL": true,
    "PORT": "633"
}

The slight problem today was figuring out how to get Site 24×7 to not just verify the link, but check the JSON values and verify it is what I need.  If not, then send the alert.  In this case, I want to verify AS400CONNECTION is true and SSL is true.

Site 24×7 suggests using a REST API monitor and then asserting the value in JSONPath.  I was completely new to this and finding a good clean example was a bit tough, hopefully this saves someone some time.  Here’s …