Help and Support

How to get help and support

The view HELP AND SUPPORT provides the initial links to get help and support, should you encounter any issues in Code for IBM i.

Get started

This link will open the documentation for Code for IBM i in your browser, making it easy to go directly from Code for IBM i to the information on how to use it.

Open official Forum

This link will take you to the Code for IBM i discussions, where you can ask any question on how to use the product.

Review Issues

If you encounter an issue or have a problem that you suspect may be a bug in Code for IBM i, please use this link for the Issues section in the GitHub repository, where you can see all open and closed issue reports created by the users since the start of the project. There is a good chance that your problem has been seen before and a solution or workaround found, or a fix may have been created to solve a similar problem.

Report an Issue

Caution

Do not use the VS Code Issue Reporter (found in Help menu item Report Issue)!

This issue reporter does not include the configuration and logs necessary to debug your issue, and time will be wasted while the support team will request additional information from you.

If searching existing issue reports using the link above did not give you the solution to your problem, you can create a new issue report using this link.

Tip

Keep your connection to the IBM i system active when creating the issue report (to have all important system information included in the report).

When you click on Report an Issue in the HELP AND SUPPORT view, your browser will open the GitHub issues page with a template containing the following information:

• Code for IBM i version, VS Code version and OS
• Active extensions
• Remote system information, e.g. IBM i release, TR level, CCSID, enabled features and more
• Shell environment
• Variants (used for CCSID troubleshooting)
• Errors (the last three commands executed on the server and the result)

You must also provide a title and thorough description of the issue with information on how to recreate the issue encountered.

Danger

All issues are available to the public, so any sensitive information must be redacted before submitting the issue report!

Tip

You need to have or create a GitHub account to create an issue report.

Download Logs

Often the support team will ask for the full Code for IBM i log to better understand what’s happened. For this you can use Download Logs. This will show a pop-up where you can choose which of the following logs you want to download:

• Code for IBM i log
• Debug Service log
• Debug Service Eclipse Instance log

Next you will be prompted for a directory in which to save a zip file containing the chosen log files. After the zip file has been downloaded, you get this message:

When you click on Open, your file explorer will open with the cursor on the zip file, and you can upload the file to your issue report on Github.