Reviving InfoSeeker
InfoSeeker was a 5250 based viewer for proprietary IBM "BOOK" files, providing system documentation before IBM finally adopted PDF as documentation document format of choice.
About BOOK files
IBM "removed" InfoSeeker from OS/400 in V4R4, to force people to use either the poor quality Windows-based IBM Softcopy Reader, or alternatively use the public internet based IBM Document Library Server (defunct[1]) which provided an online conversion from BOOK to HTML format to view content in a browser directly.
There once has been a web service to convert BOOK files to PDF, but the functionality was removed.
One possible alternative to view BOOK files might be the InfoSeeker viewer[2], which was still completely included in V4R5. Compared to the officially working V4R3 version, it tested the existence of a data area. If it wasn't existing, the message line will just tell that STRINFSKR has been removed.
Making it work again
CRTDTAARA DTAARA(QUSRSYS/QBMGINFSKR) TYPE(*CHAR) LEN(8)[3]
The length parameter isn't critical, because there is no content anyway.
After creating the data area STRINFSKR will function again.
Additional details
- BOOK files and accompanying SHELF files are expected to be located in in /QDLS/QBKBOOKS/BOOKS/.
- QDLS is a file system with limits of file names like MS DOS.
- /QDLS/QBKBOOKS/BOOKS is part of the QBOOKPATH system variable.
- To open a BOOK file directly, use
STRINFSKR OPTION(*BOOK) BOOK(BOOKNAME).- The .BOO extension is implicit.
- The BOOK's name is searched in all paths listed in the QBOOKPATH system variable
Initial tests showed that creating a shelf in /QDLS/QBKBOOKS/BOOKS/ fails: InfoSeeker consumes 100 % CPU and does not recover. The books themselves have been placed in /QDLS/QBKBOOKS/ for this test, and the book search path was set accordingly to /QDLS/QBKBOOKS/.
Weblinks
- STRINFSKR, Midrange Mailing-List via Midrange.com
- IBM.com:
- IBM Z Publications Archive site will replace the Library Server site, IBM-Main Mailing-List via Google Groups
- boo2pdf Source Code, not quite usable out of the box
- IBM BookManager BookServer 2.3 Docker Container assembled from public sources.
Footnotes
- ↑ It has been taken down from service at June 1, 2019. With it, a lot of older but still useful documentation vanished from the Internet.
- ↑ However, it cannot display imbedded graphics, neither bitmapped, nor vector based.
- ↑ Thanks to MSW for extensive debugging and eventually providing a web link showing this command.