Rocket® COBOL

Created On:  20 December 2012 Problem: Working and debugging an application in Thin Client mode, the remote clients usually are remapped on the server to an unique local user-name. This causes different developers/testers to work in debug using an unique .adb file. Since developers may create their own breakpoints, the .adb file is constantly rewritten. Sometimes the file may become corrupted, breakpoints lost or the multiple accesses at the same time may cause remote debuggers to hang. Is it possible to isolate this file so that each user has its own file? Resolution: In order to have different debug files for different working users, you need to make sure you have different values of USER-ID for each local user-name. The best way to do that is to log in as different users, not have everyone use the same username. This means that you must have in the AcuAccess file and these variables in you acurcl.cfg file: SECURITY_METHOD   LOGONWINNT_LOGON_DOMAIN &nbs

Created On:  18 January 2013 Problem: How do I get the compilers to support Cobol 68 style copy statements? 01 SOME-NAME COPY SOME Copy. The first line of the copy book (01) is replaced by the SOMENAME value when the copy occurs. $SET OLDCOPY – First line of program. (Directive) They were getting the following errors when trying to use the OLDCOPY directive with ENTCOBOL dialect. COBCH2043W OLDCOPY incompatible with flagging dialect: C:\\xxx\\xxx\\COBOL\\CMN\\A13B002R.CBL (1, 6) COBCH0634S Feature not supported in selected dialect: C:\\xxx\\xxx\\COBOL\\CMN\\A13B002R.CBL,c:\\lam\\mpi\\copy\\cmn\\TEPREC.CPY(2,9) Resolution: Make sure the following dialects are set: Dialect: non-mainframe Additional dialects: Dialect"MF" OSVS Incident #2572427 Old KB# 36743#dialect#COBOL#COBOL68#Enterprise#COPYBOOKS

Created On:  14 January 2013 Problem: Customer has a Visual COBOL Windows Forms application that has forms which use TabControls made up of various tabPages. Each tabPage contains data relevant to the header. The first tabPage on form XYZ is called 'Personal'. The first textBox control on tabPage 'Personal' is called 'Per-Code'. The tab order says that 'Per-Code' is value 0.0.0 with the Personal tabPage having a tab order of 0. There are no other tab values of 0.0.0 within the tabPage of Personal. At runtime the code used is within the Form_Load event is:     set tabControl1::SelectedTab to Personal     Invoke Per-Code::Focus However, on running the form the field Per-Code doesn't become active until the key is pressed and then the textBox Per-Code becomes 'live' and editable. What command needs to be used so that the key does not have to be pressed fi

Created On:  14 January 2013 Problem: The application sends terminal escape sequences to control terminal behavior. When running in standard mode it works correctly. In debug mode the escape codes are not interpreted but look like they are simply displayed on the screen. This occurred after upgrading from version 7.0 to 9.1. Resolution: In version 8.0.0 the handling of terminal escape sequences was modified to fix an issue where they interfered with the debugger window in some cases. A new configuration variable, ANSI_OUTPUT_IN_DEBUG, was also added to provide the old behavior. To resolve this issue set ‘ANSI_OUTPUT_IN_DEBUG’ to ‘TERMINAL’ either in the environment or in the Runtime configuration file. It may not be set programmatically as it must be applied before the terminal is initialized. n/a Old KB# 36734

Created On:  10 January 2013 Problem: Customer was converting an application from Net Express to Visual COBOL.  The application was using Dialog System and the extension called DSONLINE which allows you to display Windows Help files in the .HLP format from within Dialog System screens.Customer installed the Visual COBOL Compatibility Addpack to provide support for Dialog System in Visual COBOL but the DSONLINE support was not available.  How can an application using Dialog System and DSONLINE callouts be run in Visual COBOL? Resolution: The Dialog System extension DSONLINE was made available in a file named DSONLINE.GNT which exists in the Net Express\\base\\DialogSystem\\bin folder.This file has not been ported to Visual COBOL and it is documented as not being supported in Visual COBOL.If you wish to run your Visual COBOL Dialog System applications that use DSONLINE then you must copy the DSONLINE.GNT file from Net Express to your applications output folder and t

Created On:  11 January 2013 Problem: Customer is converting from RM COBOL to Visual COBOL and would like an example of how to configure the file handler to use the RM file handler so that he can access existing ISAM files.  Customer is using Visual COBOL 2.1. Resolution: Customer is using Visual COBOL 2.1 which has some new features for easier configuration of the target file handler than previous releases of Visual COBOL.There is a simple demo attached to this article.Download and unzip this to your C:\\drive retaining the folder structure in the zip file as some of the file assignments are dependant upon this structure. *----------------------------------------------------------------**                          ISAMDemoNativeRM ** This example program demonstrates how to setup indexed file * handling in a native Visual COBOL handling

Created On:  21 January 2013 Problem: While attempting to compile a COBOL program to gnt on AIX, you receive an error similar to the following: # cob -u -C trace myprog.cbl Execution error : file 'cdi2'error code: 114, pc=0, call=1, seg=0114     Attempt to access item beyond bounds of memory (Signal 11) cob32: error(s) in code generation: myprog.int Resolution: This problem can be caused by attempting to compile to gnt when the /proc filesystem is not mounted on AIX. Please ensure the /proc filesystem is correctly mounted, and try the compile again.  You can determine whether the /proc filesystem is mounted by using the following command: df -k The following is a sample output from the above command. Notice that the /proc filesystem is listed:Filesystem    1024-blocks      Free %Used    Iused %Iused Mounted on/dev/hd4         52428800  52

Created On:  21 December 2012 Problem: Sysinternals process monitor is a very powerful system trace tool on Windows. However it can be difficult to diagnose issues due to the volume of the information produced. It is possible to output custom events to the trace from an application so you can give the information you see an application context. The attached example shows how you can output events from a COBOL application. Resolution: The help for procmon details how you can inject application trace messages to procmon. However the example code is C based. The attachment to this article contains a COBOL example that details how you can utilise this functionality from COBOL.If you start procmon and run the example code then you will see events from the COBOL application in the trace:-To see the events to also need to enable to process profiling events on the toolbar:- Attachments ProcMonOutputDemo.zip Old KB# 36695#Enterprise#COBOL

Created On:  10 January 2013 Problem: Customer was converting an application from Net Express to Visual COBOL. The application was using Dialog System and the extension called DSHTML which allows you to display Windows Help files in the .CHM format from within Dialog System screens. Customer installed the Visual COBOL Compatibility Addpack to provide support for Dialog System in Visual COBOL but the DSHTML support was not available. How can an application using Dialog System and DSHTML callouts be run in Visual COBOL? Resolution: The Dialog System extension DSHTML was made available in a file named DSHTML.CBL which exists in the Net Express\\base\\Examples\\DialogSystem\\HTMLHELP folder. If you wish to run your Visual COBOL Dialog System applications that use DSHTML then you must copy the DSHTML.CBLfile from Net Express and compile it as a .DLL in Visual COBOL and make it available to your application.A demo program has been attached to this article which uses DSHTML in Vis

Created On:  15 January 2013 Problem: An executable that is built with Net Express 5.1 WrapPack 6 (5.106.0079) or Net Express 5.1 WrapPack 7 (5.107.0047) fails to run on Server 5.1 with the following error message:"Entry point _codeset could not be located in the dynamic link library cblrtss.dll" Resolution: This error usually occurs when running an executable that was built with Net Express 5.1 WrapPack 6 or Net Express 5.1 WrapPack 7 on Server 5.1 that does not have the same or more recent WrapPack level.You will need to upgrade your Server 5.1 to the same wrappack level that was used to compile the executable. Incidents #2603841, 2606944, 2613106 Old KB# 36737#_codesetcblrtss.dllwrappack5.1

Created On:  11 January 2013 Problem: Customer has requirement to read in and process a Unicode text file which is stored in UTF-16 LE format. The fields in each record are delimited by a UTF-16 tab character and records are delimited by UTF-16 CRLF characters. How can a file such as this be read and processed in a Net Express application? Resolution: Net Express does not support this type of file directly but attached is a sample program that will read it using the CBL byte stream file routines and will parse the individual data records from the file and then further parse each record into its tab delimited fields placing the fields in a PIC N field for processing as UTF-16 data. Here is the source code to the demo:*------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------**                      CONVERTUTF16    &

Created On:  18 January 2013 Problem: Customer is converting a Net Express native application to Visual COBOL managed .NET code.Under Net Express the application uses OpenESQL to connect to SQL Server database using ODBC. (SQL(DBMAN=ODBC))It is a multithreaded application so the compiler directive SQL(THREAD=ISOLATE) was being used so that database connections would not be shared between threads.Under Visual COBOL the managed .NET application is using SQL(DBMAN=ADO) and the customer reports that connections to SQL Server are being shared between threads even though they specify SQL(THREAD=ISOLATE). The question would be is the THREAD=ISOLATE directive supported for use with ADO or is it onlu supported for ADO? Resolution: The SQL(THREAD=ISOLATE) directive applies only to ODBC. For managed code, both JDBC and ADO, the SQL runtime isolates SQL runtime instances associated with service requests by using run units rather than threads, in line with recommend

Created On:  18 January 2013 Problem: Customer installed Net Express 5.1 WP 5 on a Windows 2008 server in Japan. The Net Express IDE now shows all of the toolbars in Japanese. When this happened in Windows 2003 servers, They just copied the BASE/bin/Lang/01 folder contents to 20 and this fixed the problem. Unfortunately, this tact is not working on the Windows 2008 server. Is there another way to set the IDE to display in English? Customer is using Studio Enterprise Edition 6.0 Resolution: First check to see what version you downloaded from the Micro Focus website. Under “Help” it would show whether or not this is in fact an English version. However, if this still shows the IDE in a different language than the one you wanted you should Check the operating system installation. Ex. Windows 2003, 2008 etc. In this case the customer missed the language setting when he installed Windows 2008. The Windows 2008 version of the Regional Language settings is different than the previo

Created On:  21 December 2012 Problem: SQL Server 2005 introduces the varbinary(max) column type for storage of large blocks of data. OpenESQL currently has a column size limit of 65K. The article will detail how you can store data in these columns even with the 65K limit. Resolution: SQL Server has a "write" function that allows you to write data to offsets in a table column. This works well with the varbinary(max) column to enable applications to store large documents or binary objects in SQL Server.Attached to this article is a example showing how to use the write function from COBOL. Incident #2597799 Attachments Varbinarymax.zip Old KB# 36694#varbinarymaxvarchar#Enterprise#COBOL

Created On:  09 January 2013 Problem: In the Visual COBOL documentation it shows a sample command line for installing Safenet licenses using the CesAdminTool as follows:     start /wait\\bin\\cesadmintool –term activate AuthorizationCodeHowever, when the following is run placing quotes around the command name because of spaces in the folder name an error occurs:     start /wait "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Common Files\\SafeNet Sentinel\\Sentinel RMS License Manager\\WinNT\\cesadmintool" -term activate 1234567890123456What is the correct command line to use to install a Safenet license from the command line? Resolution: It seems that the problem occurs because the start command expects there to be a title parameter present when starting it this way.  Placing a dummy title in the command line as follows will fix the problem:   start /wait "" "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Common Files\\SafeNet Sentinel\\Sentinel RMS License

Created On:  20 December 2012 Problem: Acubench 9.1 returns "license file not found". Which are the correct licenses to use? Resolution: Acubench 9.1 used to have an issue with the license file. As a matter of fact, extend 9.1.0 and 9.1.1 contains AcuBench 9.0.1. You must expand the AcuBench license code and key with a 9.0.1 activator. For these releases, there is a 9.0.1 activator included in the AcuBench directory. The related acubench.alc file must contain:#  Product........: AcuBench#  Version........: 9.0.0 and usually is located inside this directory:%allusersprofile%\\Micro Focus\\extend\\9.0.1\\x86 This issue is now fixed in 9.1.2.1. So, this release and later need a 9.1.2.1 license which must contain:#  Product........: AcuBench#  Version........: 9.1.0 This acubench license file is located in this Windows directory:%allusersprofile%\\Micro Focus\\extend\\9.1.2\\x86 Incidents #2605858, 2602885 Attachments acubench-license-not-

Created On:  27 November 2012 Problem: Import large project 2500 COBOL source files and 5000 copy books. A process is automatically started that will index all the source code and copy books so that ECLIPSE IDE navigation can take place of variables in copy books. This may take a long time. Resolution: In the Window/preferences/Micro Focus COBOL/Builder Page,  set the ‘Enable Indexer’ check box to off. Incident #2602944 Old KB# 36637

Created On:  04 December 2012 Problem: The error message produced is: "Acubench Integrated Development Environment has stopped working". Sometimes, when compiling a COBOL program, AcuBench would crash. This was due to a correction made in 9.1.2 that removed memory leaks. Resolution: This issue has been resolved by ECN-WB915: SUBJECT: AcuBench crash on build Change Number: ECN-WB915 Status: Complete Type of Change: Correction Priority: High Incidents: 2597131 RPI Number: 1086395 Date: 2012-11-13 Product: AcuBench Module: ccbldll.dll New Version: 9.2.0 Machines Affected: Windows only Known Versions Affected: 9.1.2 and later DESCRIPTION of problem or enhancement: Sometimes, when compiling a COBOL program, AcuBench would crash. This was due to a correction made in 9.1.2 that removed memory leaks.Please either request or raise an incident with the Micro Focus Supportline and request this patch for V9.1.2. The next AcuCobol version release is extend V9.2.0 which  is cu

Created On:  20 November 2012 Problem: The Visual COBOL v2.1 documentation states that the return parameter for the C$SetEnv RM library call within is optional. Syntax: CALL "C$SetEnv" USING name, value [, return] Parameters: name  PIC X(n) value  PIC X(n) return PIC 9(n) BINARY, where n can be a digit from 1 to 9 However if the "return" parameter is not used an ArrayIndexOutOfBounds Exception occurs. Resolution: The return parameter must be used. Incident #2602271 Old KB# 36621#ArrayIndexOutOfBounds#CSetEnv#COBOL

Created On:  03 December 2012 Problem: When trying to install an AcuCobol product on Linux the error message appears - libc.so.6.1: version `GLIBC_2.3.4' not found. Resolution: To install an AcuCobol product on a Linux machine the minimum Operating System requirement is GLIBC_2.3.4.  The customer should be advised to upgrade the Linux platform to at least this level. Old KB# 36653#COBOL

Created On:  10 December 2012 Problem: When compiling a COBOL program, AcuBench 9.1.2.1 crashes. Resolution: This is due to a correction made in 9.1.2 that removed memory leaks. There is a new ECN-WB915 that will be included in version 9.2.0, but there is already a patch available for AcuBench 9.1.2.1, which is patch 1357, that could be requested to SupportLine. Incident #2603766 Old KB# 36670

Created On:  04 December 2012 Problem: Customer has application in native code which loads another native .dll called "prog2.dll" which contains the program "subprog" using the following syntax:01 pp procedure-pointer....    set pp to entry "prog2"    if pp not = null       call "subprog"    else       display "load error"    end-if.When executed from native code the set statement results in pp being set to the first ordinal in the .dll whether or not it has an entry point with the same name as the .dll. They are converting the main program to managed code and when they execute the same code to load the native "prog2.dll", the .dll is loaded correctly but the value of pp remains null so the test of null fails. Why? Resolution: When executing the set statement in managed code it will only set the value of pp to non-null if the .dll being loaded ha

Created On:  14 December 2012 Problem: Customer has an application that uses many indexed files that are opened for input so that the application can read records in each of the files.This processes OK when only a single instance of the application is running but when multiple instances of the application are running, the performance gets quite a bit worse and file locks begin to be returned to the applications.No application is updating the files.  How can we improve the performance and get rid of the locking issues that are occurring when multiple instances of the application are running? Resolution: Try opening the files using the following statement:   OPEN INPUT SHARING WITH READ ONLY filenameThis tells the file handler to only allow other applications to open the file for read-only so that it does not have to include all of the overhead checking to see if the files have been updated by another application since the last read took place.This can dra

Created On:  28 November 2012 Problem: Having build several Visual COBOL executables a customer would like to deploy them onto peoples desktops. Rather than have a standard 'Windows' icon on the desktop to represent their application they would like to have their own images displayed as the icon. How do they build the executable so that these 'images' can be seen as the desktop icon rather than the 'Windows' icon? Resolution: Basically just open up project properties to Application tab and select the icon that you want to use for the application: Old KB# 36641#Enterprise#VisualCOBOL#COBOL#EnterpriseDeveloper

Created On:  04 December 2012 Problem: Is it possible through AcuCobol to change the fonts or enlarge the pop-up menu? Resolution: This is not possible from COBOL. You would need to choose the size of menus by using the Windows Control Panel. And there is only minimal control there. Old KB# 36660#COBOL