I work on the IBM iSeries systems. In 2016 I will need to submit transmissions to the IRS for healthcare reporting. Part of that process involves generating an MD5 checksum for the file being sent, and also a UUID. I understand that GoAnywhere Director can handle the MD5 requirement. I need information on how to generate the UUID. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Gcoxusa,

Currently, we do not have a way to generate a UUID within GoAnywhere implicitly. We do allow you to utilize HTTP calls and retrieve values from a Web Service or connect to a Database and retrieve values.

One option is the following link:

http://www.fileformat.info/tool/guid.ht ... ormat=text

It will allow you to connect and return a UUID value. This can be done interactively within your GA Workflow, to use while defining your UTID needed for the IRS transfer.

If you are installed on Linux, this link:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/uuidgen

Will generate a UUID for you by calling a command line utility.

If you're using Windows and have Powershell:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscripting ... shell.aspx

or MAC

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac ... gen.1.html

But, I believe you also have options to create these values using your DB. Since you work on the iSeries, you should have access to the DB2 database. This means, you could generate a DB2 Function to create the unique UTID (or just the UUID part) by selecting this from an SQL UserDefined Function.

IT Jungle has a nice write-up showing just how to do this:

http://www.itjungle.com/fhg/fhg082714-story01.html

So, as you can see, there are options to help you generate a UUID, either from HTTP, Command Line interfacing on your installed machine or through your Database.

OK - thanks for all the good information. I've got the UUID program resolved using the GENUUID API on the iSeries.

Would I be able to take advantage of the MD5-Checksum feature within Goanywhere by calling a Goanywhere function? I am working on an iSeries and would like to call a Goanywhere process within a CL program. We do have Goanywhere Director although I am not yet set up for that.

Gcoxusa,

You can access a file transfer from your iSeries easily by calling the RunProject API from the iSeries to transfer the file.

Checksum verification can be added to the FTPS task to ensure that the source file is exactly the same as the destination file after a transfer completes successfully. This option is available on the Put, Get, Mget, Manual Get, and Manual Put elements. Both the CRC32 and MD5 algorithms are supported with the default and recommended algorithm being MD5. Errors may occur if the transfer was performed in ASCII mode, if the FTPS server doesn’t support checksum verification or if the calculated values do not match.

So, by calling a GA Workflow task that does the file transfer for you, you can incorporate the MD5 automatically for transfer utilizing the FTPS transfer from within your iSeries CLP or RPG program.