AS400 & HTML

Hello Friends,

To all my friends who just started AS400 learning/working or having few years of experience on it, this article is going to give you some basics of how we can combine AS400 with HTML. After reading this article you guys may get awesome ideas and explore more on this by your own.

This article is indented for people who know basics of HTML and AS400.

Where to store our HTML:

            AS400 IFS path is the place you write your own HTML and store it. Either you can write it in physical file and copy it to IFS or just a simple notepad and upload (or FTP) the file into your IFS directory.

Sample file: Do note the IFS path I have stored the file

Starting Apache server:

Yes, AS400 (version >= V4R5) comes with in build Apache server. This will be used to handle HTTP request coming into AS400. Use below command to check if your HTTP server is already running.

WRKACTJOB SBS(QHTTPSVR)

If not start it using below command

STRTCPSVR *HTTP HTTPSVR(*ADMIN)

Use this command to start Apache Default server

STRTCPSVR SERVER(*HTTP) HTTPSVR(APACHEDFT)

Now just point your AS400 IP in your browser and look for index.html

E.g. http://yourip/index.html

Apache Config:

/www/apachedft/conf/httpd.conf is the configuration file for apache and make sure below piece of code is available in it

It states all the documents are from /www/apachedft/htdocs so the index.html should be inside this directory. And any html file we create in this path will be accessible in your browser.

So let’s view our welcome.html (from htdocs path)

How to retrieve HTML from different IFS path:

So it is not restricted that we have to place our entire HTML inside document root path. Instead we can use Alias match and assign specific IFS folder for document retrieval.

Just edit the httpd.conf file of apachedft and add these lines.

So if anything comes as /mydocs/ in url will look for files from /Home/Devyus directory.

e.g.: http://yourip/mydocs/welcome.html

before we test this we have to restart our APACHEDFT server since we have modified the config file

STRTCPSVR SERVER(*HTTP) RESTART(*HTTP) HTTPSVR(APACHEDFT)

After restart check it in browser using above example url

What Next?

So till now it is not a big deal because we are just showing some static HTML page available from AS400 IFS. What is really interesting will be, how to use this functionality as front end and which calls RPGLE program based on inputs and RPGLE returns output back to browser. Looks great is it…

Yes, It is possible using CGI programming in AS400. I shall come back soon with some basic example of how CGI works and how to build our first web based application which integrates with our RPGLE business logic and DB2 database and produces result back on the web. Until then…

Have Fun…!!! Happy coding..!!!