Coding Standards for Database Files › Standards for Defining Messages › Monitoring for Generic Message Groups

Monitoring for Generic Message Groups

To facilitate monitoring for user-defined exception messages, you should:

• Use only one prefix for all the escape and notify messages in a system. For example, if all escape messages begin with the letters ‘USE’, then it is possible to monitor for messages globally.
• Avoid using message identifiers that end in zeroes for escape, notify, and status messages.
• Use prefixes to allow for generic monitoring, for example, prefixes, which have similar numeric groups. For example:

A systematic use of message prefixes also facilitates documentation. For instance, if all escape messages begin with ‘USE’, then it is possible to list just escape messages, using the MSGID(*RANGE) facility of the OS/400 ‘Display message description’ command (DSPMSGD). For example:

DSPMSGD MSGID(*RANGE) MSGF(QUSRMSG) RANGE(USE0000 USE9999)

You may use dummy messages to provide section headings within the message file.