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There may be cases, where a page created from a CGI (dynamic page)
  • is frequently accessed
  • requires some relevant processing, thus providing a rather long response time
  • and its contents may change at unpredictable times
Examples of such cases could be:
  • our page about "our subscribers per country"
  • many other statistics pages
One interesting way to serve such requests is to have some dynamic processes generating static pages:
  • user response is much faster
  • computer load much lower

  • the generation of a static page may be triggered by an event or scheduled at a regular time interval
Implementing such a process is quite easy: you have to write a batch program similar to a CGI and gear it to some event or schedule.

Here is how you may write such a program:

  1. Develop the external HTML as usual for a CGI program, but
    1. do not insert the initial http header
      Content-type: text/html
      (you are going to build a static page)
  2. Develop the program as if it were a CGI program using our CGISRVPGM2 service program (you may use our command to create an initial sample CGI source)
    1. avoid reading and parsing the input string
      (drop our cgidev2/crtcgisrc generated statement
      /copy .../qrpglesrc,prolog1/2/3
      )
    2. instead of sending the html buffer to the client with the instruction
      callp     wrtsection('*fini')
      save it as an IFS stream file using the subrocedure WrtHtmlToStmf(): 
      D  Stmf           s            512    varying
D                                     inz('/web/dynapage1.html')
D  CCSID          s             10i 0 inz(819)
D  rc             s             10i 0
 * If "CCSID" parameter omitted, the CCSID is assigned by the
 * system (the CCSID of the job is used).
C                   if        CCSID > 0
C                   eval      rc = WrtHtmlToStmf(Stmf:CCSID)
C                   else
C                   eval      rc = WrtHtmlToStmf(Stmf)
C                   endif
    Notes:
    1. The filename portion in the "stream file" variable supports a maximum length of 245 bytes.
    2. Create the program with actgrp(*new).
    3. Subprocedure WrtHtmlToStmf() clears the output buffer before returning to the user program. This is done to allow the user program to create more than one stream file without overlaying previous output data.
    4. CCSID 1208 should be used for UTF-8 Unicode.
      For other CCSID's see this page.
    5. Should you need instead to append the html buffer to an existing stream file, you must use subprocedure AppHtmlToStmf(): 
      D  Stmf           s            512    varying
D                                     inz('/web/dynapage1.html')
D  rc             s             10i 0
C                   eval      rc = AppHtmlToStmf(Stmf)

Example of a dynamic/static page:

  • Please browse the source of our example program. It would generate a page containing some random integers. To run this program:
    1. addlible cgidev2
    2. enter command
      CGIDEV2/RANDOMNBRS STMF('/cgidev/randomnbrs.htm') CODEPAGE(819)
  • Check out the generated static page.

Error codes.
If subprocedure wrtHtmlToStmf does not complete normally, it returns a non-zero error code (in field "rc"). Error codes are documented in an IBM Infocenter separate page.