Rocket® COBOL

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:  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:  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:  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:  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:  07 January 2013 Problem: In previous releases of Visual Cobol 2.1 update 1 the contents of the Link with OBJS field is duplicated when you move away from the COBOL LINK tab. Resolution: You will need to upgrade to the latest version of Visual COBOL so that there is no duplication created for the Link with objs field. Incident #2602784 Old KB# 36713

Created On:  11 January 2013 Problem: Customer has a Visual COBOL application that resides on a remote server, on which COBOL Server is installed.  They install all of their user licenses on this remote server using the Micro Focus License Manager.Users attached to this remote server also have COBOL Server installed on their workstations as they will be running the application locally, executing it from the remote server.Instead of installing a user license locally onto each of these workstations, the customer would like the local Micro Focus License Manager to look on the remote server for the centralized license that has been installed.Is there a way to configure the local Micro Focus License Manager to look at the remote server for licenses as part of a silent installation of the COBOL Server product on the workstations? Resolution: Yes, there is a command line utility that can be run after the silent install of COBOL Server has been done on the workstation. The fol

Created On:  04 January 2013 Problem: How can Visual COBOL updates (wrappacks) and hotfixes be installed silently? Resolution: Visual COBOL Updates and Hotfixes are provided as standard Microsoft patch files (.msp) and so they can be installed using the msiexec command and its available switches. To silently install hotfix3 for example you can use: msiexec /p c:\\yourfolder\\visualcobolvisualstudio21_hotfix03.msp /qn Incident #2607705 Old KB# 36707#EnterpriseDeveloper#VisualCOBOL#Enterprise#COBOL

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:  03 January 2013 Problem: Customer has created a Windows Forms application in Visual COBOL.The Form has a textbox control and a button control labeled Save.There is a validation event handler for the textbox which displays a message if the textbox is blank and sets e::Cancel to true.The AutoValidate property for the window is EnablePreventFocus and its AcceptButton property is set to the save button.  The button's text property is set to "&Save" so that ALT-S will cause the button's click event.The button has a handler for the click event which closes the form.If the textbox is left blank and the button is clicked, the validation fails and focus remains on the textbox which is correct. If text is then entered in the textbox and either ALT-S or ENTER is pressed, the validation event code successfully completes but the button's click event handler is not performed.If the button is clicked again the click

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: 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:  20 December 2012 Problem: Does WIN$VERSION work on newest Microsoft platforms?  What are the values returned? Resolution: The values returned by a WIN$VERSION executed using ACUCOBOL Runtime 9.1.2.1 are:for Windows 8:WIN-MAJOR-VERSION = 6WIN-MINOR-VERSION = 2WIN-PLATFORM = 3WIN-WORDSIZE = 3WIN-BUILDNUMBER = 9200 WIN-CSDVERSION =WIN-SERVICEPACK-MAJOR = 0WIN-SERVICEPACK-MINOR = 0 WIN-SUITEMASK = 0256 WIN-PRODUCTTYPE = 1for Windows Server 2012:WIN-MAJOR-VERSION = 6WIN-MINOR-VERSION = 2WIN-PLATFORM = 3WIN-WORDSIZE = 3WIN-BUILDNUMBER = 9200 WIN-CSDVERSION =WIN-SERVICEPACK-MAJOR = 0WIN-SERVICEPACK-MINOR = 0 WIN-SUITEMASK = 0272WIN-PRODUCTTYPE = 3The attachements shows the same values in a graphical way. Incident #2600608 Attachments winversion-of-win8.jpgwinversion-of-win2012.jpg Old KB# 36689#COBOL#archive

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:  07 January 2013 Problem: Animator is not reflecting the colors you've selected in your .Xdefaults file.Animator is the COBOL debugger on UNIX/Linux.  It operates in character-mode on a terminal.  There are various ways of invoking Animator, such as by entering the “anim” command, or by setting the COBSW= A environment variable, or calling CBL_DEBUGBREAK from within a COBOL program, or using cross-session animation with “cobanimsrv”. In most cases, when Animator first starts, it looks for an environment variable named DISPLAY.  If the DISPLAY environment variable is set (and appears to refer to a valid X-windows server), Animator opens a new ‘xterm’ terminal on that X server, and the user sees the xterm window appear on X-windows.  This could even be an X server on a separate machine than the UNIX/Linux machine where the COBOL program is running.  If DISPLAY is not set, Animator operates within the user’s original terminal session. Resol

Created On:  21 December 2012 Problem: If you use keybcf to configure any key which starts with the escape character as the first character in its sequence, you cannot use the Escape key. Resolution: In order to resolve this, configure the Escape function as escape escape, that is, two escapes. You are then able to use this function by pressing Escape twice.Use adiscf to set the compatibility key list option in the ADISCTRL file. Use option 22 for this.Use option 2 to say use the compatibility key list.Save and exit adiscf.Now you can configure the cobkeymp file, using keybcf. Function key 0 press x getting into hex inputmode. Type in 1b 1b   ( press the space bar) press return.The escape key is now configured it will return a 1, 0, 0 in crt-status when you press the escape key twice in the application.Make sure the x’1B’ is not configured anywhere else if it is remove it check function key 27.Use the review option to look at the compatibility key list the e

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:  22 January 2013 Problem: When executing an application which resides on a mapped network drive and the application makes a call to a dll you get an Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515 similar to: Resolution: The problem is that the CLR v4 security policy model has changed since previous versions and are not sandboxing assemblies as before.Adding the snippet below to an app.config file will allow your application to load dlls from remote systems:<CONFIGURATION>  <RUNTIME>    <LOADFROMREMOTESOURCES enabled="true" />  </RUNTIME></CONFIGURATION> You may also be able to fix the error by finding the assembly DLL in Windows Explorer, right clicking, choosing Properties, and then pressing the "unblock" button. The DLL has a stream that is marking it as an external file - and by clicking unblock you remove that designation. Incident #2609953 Old KB# 36760

Created On:  21 January 2013 Problem: The output of the Apptrack "License List" and "License Summary" is sometimes confusing. Resolution: In Apptrack the first menu item is "1. License List".  This shows the properties of all licenses installed in Apptrack, with a sequence number for each, and separated by lines of hyphen characters, for example: --------------------------------------------00001...--------------------------------------------00002... All licenses in Apptrack are "runtime" licenses, i.e. they give permission for COBOL programs to run.  This is in contrast to Server Express licenses, also known as "compiler" or "development" licenses, which allow the COBOL compiler to be used, and which are installed into the separate LMF license manager, and administered using a separate utility named "mflmadm" (not Apptrack). There are two main types of runtime licenses in Apptrack.  The first is Developer Usage runtime licenses.  In the Apptrack Licen

Created On:  07 January 2013 Problem: When compiling your application you receive a 114 error:Executon error : file 'pic4mat'eror code: 114, pc=0, call=1, seg=0114 error message text not found(Signal 11) Resolution: This error is given on applications which were compiled using Net Express 4.0 or previous versions. You will need to upgrade your development environment to version later than 4.0 and recompile your application (preferably the latest version of Net Express). Incident #2605630 Old KB# 36711

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:  21 January 2013 Problem: Customer is using the PREXML preprocessor in Server Express to use COBOL syntax to create XML files.By default, these files are written as formatted XML files with CRLF following each record as well as spaces between record so XML will appear formatted when viewed as text file.Customer would like to know if these files can be written without the formatting characters in them. Current program looks something like the following:        $set p(prexml) endp                                                    id division.                        &nbsp

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