pcf Archives - Mark Taylor's Blog

MQ PCF value formatting

In MQ V8, a new header file made it easy for C programs to convert MQI numbers into the corresponding string definition. For example, turning 2035 into MQRC_NOT_AUTHORIZED. For formatting PCF-based messages such as events, you can easily convert the names of fields in those events using functions like MQIA_STR or MQCACH_STR. But what about turning the values in those elements into a string? There is a new tool in the MQ Go library to help with MQ PCF value formatting. And it is easy to adopt or port it for other languages too.

This post was last updated on March 2nd, 2025 at 05:37 pm

Event formatter changes with MQ 9.2.4

IBM has just announced MQ 9.2.4. No matter how hard you search the announcement letters you will still not be able to find anything about the event formatter changes that I was able to slip into the release. That’s because changes to samples don’t normally deserve highlighting in formal marketing documents. But I hope this change still turns out to be useful.

This post was last updated on November 24th, 2021 at 01:12 pm

Application Activity – formatting and extracting key information

MQ Application Activity reports have a lot of detail. This post shows a simple way to extract key fields for simpler processing.

Application Activity Trace

Application Activity Trace is a mechanism on the MQ Distributed platforms that give a report of all the MQI calls made by a program. Originally configured via a text file, MQ V9 enhanced them by allowing a monitoring application to subscribe to topics that describe the application or channel of interest.
See how to extract key fields from events

This post was last updated on November 25th, 2019 at 09:45 am

Formatting MQ Events as JSON

IBM MQ has always been able to generate event messages when something “interesting” has occurred in the queue manager. These events could be showing that a queue is full, or that there has been an authorisation failure; someone needing an audit trail might want to capture the command and configuration events. These events are written as MQ messages to well-known queues, using PCF structures which can be decoded to give the full description of the event.

See how these events can now be fed to JSON-aware processors

This post was last updated on November 22nd, 2019 at 09:08 pm

MQ 8.0.0.4 Events and MQI Formatting

This article is going to talk about some new code shipped with the V8.0.0.4 FixPack to make it easier to see what a queue manager is doing, simplify investigation of possible problems, and to assist with writing your own MQ applications. Formatting MQ Events is now available as part of the MQ product.

To start with, we need to talk a little about MQ’s event generation.

Continue reading “MQ 8.0.0.4 Events and MQI Formatting”

This post was last updated on November 20th, 2019 at 09:31 pm