Rocket® COBOL

Created On:  13 June 2011 Problem: Does Web-to-Host support the use of double byte characters like is used in Japanese or other Asian languages for example? Resolution: Web-to-Host features support for double-byte character sets (DBCS) to enable customers with emulation needs in territories where DBCS is the standard. This is supported from Web- to-Host version 6.1 but please note that we only have DBCS support in Web to Host 6.1 Java clients. Old KB# 34148#Web-to-Host#Rumba

Created On:  13 June 2011 Problem: After developing a native code application using Visual COBOL for Visual Studio R3 it was deployed to a computer where COBOLRuntime2010 product was installed. A valid license for COBOLRuntime2010 had been installed and shows correctly under MF License Manager.  When running the application on this system an error 245 occurs with the following message:    No Valid Product Licenses Resolution: Licensing for the COBOLRuntime2010 product was changed between R2 and R3 of Visual COBOL for Visual Studio.  If you had installed a license that was generated for R2 initially then it will fail with this error message.  Contact Micro Focus Support and have them generate a new license using product type COBOLRuntime2010 Production.  This will generate the appropriate key for COBOLRuntime2010-Deploy in the license database file. Incident #2522698 Old KB# 34153

Created On:  08 June 2011 Problem: When installing a valid development license key for Server Express the error message "This is an expired temporary license" is received. Resolution: This issue has been known to occur in early versions of Server Express such as 2.0 and 2.2.The resolution:(Note: please be sure to have your valid license keys on-hand before executing any of the following procedures).If there are any lapsed license keys in the development license database un-install those. Next, refresh the license database and try installing the valid license key again. If that does not clear the issue you will need to recreate/reinstall the development license database, following the steps used to recover from a corrupt development license database. For Server Express 2.2 Service Pack 2 onwards, you can use $COBDIR/lmf/lmfdbrecover. For older products you will have to reinstall the license manager in order to recreate the license database. Please refer to the docu

Created On:  06 June 2011 Problem: With runtime 9.0.0, C$PARAMSIZE may cause a Memory Accesso Violation.  The same statement is working correctly under previous version of runtime. Resolution: This issue may be introduced by ECN-4048, deployed in 9.0.0. To disable this ECN and restore the previous behavior, upgrade to 9.0.1 and use one of the following solutions: Add the environment variable ECN_4048 in \\etc\\cblconfi and set it to 0 or FALSECompile the program with the pre-9.0.0 compatibility option (-c81) Incident #2512590 Old KB# 34149

Created On:  13 June 2011 Problem: Unable to compile INT to GNTcob32 -C nolist ./cobopt -uv Program.int* Micro Focus Server Express V5.1.00 Code Generator* Copyright (C) 1984-2009 Micro Focus (IP) Ltd. All rights reserved* Accepted - verbose* 019-C Program checked with non-optimal alignment. Optimal alignment is 8* Generating FG4-250* 013-R Illegal intermediate code (at 0X1757 in seg 0)cob32: error(s) in code generation: Program.intHowever on previous versions of Server Express this does not happen. Resolution: Here the int was created using a very old version of Net Express which was then ftp'd to Server Express 5.1 WebSync5. Once recompiling the int file first with Server Express 5.1 WebSync 5 then the compile command worked producing the gnt file. Old KB# 34150

Created On:  02 June 2011 Problem: The Consolidated Tracing Facility (CTF) has been enhanced in Visual COBOL for Visual Studio to work with managed code applications.  How does one set up this tracing in a managed code project? Resolution: If you are using the .NET environment, instead of setting the MFTRACE_CONFIG variable you can configure CTF tracing in an app.config file in the same folder as its associated app.exe file. The configuration statements must be inserted in an section in the as CDATA. For example: mftrace.dest = binfilemftrace.emitter.binfile#location = c:\\logsmftrace.level.mf.rts = infomftrace.comp.mf.rts#pgm = truemftrace.comp.mf.rts#pgmload = truemftrace.comp.mf.rts#syspgm = true <]]> Old KB# 34135

Created On:  25 May 2011 Problem: After installing just ACUXDBC on 64bit windows, then trying to access ACU vision files via ACUXDBC gives load failure on acuxdbc04.dll. Resolution: If you just install the ACUXDBC product your path will be not updated to point to the location of support files required to run ACUXDBC. The path has to be manually changed to include the 32bit AcuGT\\bin directory. By default, the product will install into the following directory structure:"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Micro Focus\\Acucbl9xx\\AcuGT\\bin"This is the directory that needs to be added to your path. Incident #2507260 Old KB# 34120

Created On:  13 June 2011 Problem: MFXDBC utility fails to add xfd file to syscat.When a command-line like this is executed:mfdbcutil -d "C:\\Program Files\\Micro Focus\\Server 5.1\\systemCatalog" -x "C:\\XFD" -a myfileThis error is generated:Error: A4ParseXFD failed opening file 'myfile' Resolution: Upgrade to the latest releases of MFXDBC:- Server Express 5.1 Wrap Pack 5- Net Express 5.1The new release XDBC 2.0 will be available at the end of June 2011. Incident #2518820 Old KB# 34151

Created On:  19 May 2011 Problem: Having received your keys for full licenses for Server Express, it appears that they will expire in x days. Resolution: There are two different model types for Server Express and Server for COBOL licenses; model 1 and model 2.  These different model types only really apply to the runtime product, Server for COBOL, but not the compiler product, Server Express.  If you encounter this problem, it is likely that the license keys shipped to you are model 2 type.  In order to resolve the issue, contact your Micro Focus sales representative asking for the model 2 keys to be converted to model 1.  Note that this is a purely commercial issue and cannot be resolved by your SupportLine representative. Incident #2517325 Old KB# 34106

Created On:  11 May 2011 Problem: In troubleshooting Server Express issues that occur in a UNIX/Linux environment, customers are often asked to provide COBOL programs for testing. Those programs are commonly temporarily downloaded from Pivotal and saved onto a support technician's Windows machine before being transported to a Unix or Linux system for testing. Many times, when those files are opened in a Unix or Linux editor (such as vi) on the testing machine, the files are seen to have a Windows Carriage-Return Line-Feed character (^M) appended to the ends of the lines of text. How can these be removed without using UNIX/Linux tools such as sed, vi or vim? Resolution: Do this using a copy of the file in question on the Windows system:(Note: The resolution depends on the Microsoft Visual Studio application being already installed on the technician's Windows machine).- on the Windows machine, in Windows Explorer, right-click on the document - in the menu wh

Created On:  20 April 2011 Problem: How does one handle the processing of more than one form in a .NET Windows Forms application in Visual COBOL?  How do I create the forms, show the forms, hide the forms etc.? Resolution: In a .NET WinForm application, a form is simply an instance of the System.Windows.Forms.Form class so it may be manipulated like any other .NET object.When you first create a Windows Form Application a main form named Form1 is automatically added to the project and it is instantiated in the main.cbl program which is the entry point of the project.Other forms can be added by right clicking on the project name in Solution Explorer add selecting Add->New item->Windows Form.You can then instantiate and manipulate these new forms from your main form.Please download the attachment MultiFormDemo.zip from this article and unzip it onto your C:\\drive retaining the folder structure in the .zip file.Using Visual COBOL open up the solution C:\\MultiFormDe

Created On:  14 April 2011 Problem: When the "acurcl -start" command is performed at the Command Prompt on a Windows server, the error "AcuRCL Service Error: 997" is displayed and AcuRCL fails to start. Resolution: This error is encountered when upgrading to a newer version of AcuRCL without removing the prior service.Perform "acurcl -remove" to remove Windows service from memory and then start the new version "acurcl -start". If not using the default port, indicate the port number when removing and starting the service: "acurcl -remove -n portnumber" and "acurcl -start -n portnumber". This error may also indicate an expired evaluation license. Old KB# 33894

Created On:  11 April 2011 Problem: Installing Server Express gives an error message "install error, check disk space/permissions and try again". Resolution: This is a generic error message and will be displayed for a number of different reasons.  You can verify the reason by running the install script with the -x flag to get debug information:> sh -x installThis will show each command in the script that is executed. '[' -f /opt/microfocus/cobol/etc/cobopt ']' '[' x./usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-suse-linux/4.3/32 '!=' x. ']' chmod 644 /opt/microfocus/cobol/etc/cobopt ed /opt/microfocus/cobol/etc/cobopt /opt/microfocus/cobol/./bin/cobgetmsg -s2 -p/opt/microfocus/cobol/. -e install.lng 6install error, check disk space/permissions and try again exit 1In the above example, the ed command failed while trying to modify /opt/microfocus/cobol/etc/cobopt.  Investigation showed that the ed editor was not installed as part o

Created On:  14 April 2011 Problem: The column is defined as - VARCHAR2(30 BYTE) NOT NULL - with attempts to populate with spaces. Acu4GL appears to be changing the value from spaces to null prior to the update - causing the update to fail. Resolution: Before there was an SQL standard, Oracle made the design decision that empty strings in VARCHAR/ VARCHAR2 columns were NULL and that there was only one sense of NULL (there are relational theorists that would differentiate between data that has never been prompted for, data where the answer exists but is not known by the user, data where there is no answer, etc. all of which constitute some sense of NULL). By the time that the SQL standard came around and agreed that NULL and the empty string were distinct entities, there were already Oracle users that had code that assumed the two were equivalent. So Oracle was basically left with the options of breaking existing code, violating the SQL standard, or introducing some sort of

Created On:  19 April 2011 Problem: An issue has been found where a NESTED program containing a GLOBAL file with a split ALTERNATE key referenced in one of the sub programs returns the compiler error: ‘COBCH0012S Operand alt-key-definition is not declared’ – where alt-key-definition is the ALTERNATE access key as defined in the SELECT statement. This was encountered in Net Express 5.1, but seems not to have been an issue in Net Express 3.1. So in exactly which version it happened is not clear, but it could have been as far back as Net Express 4.0. Take the following SELECT statement for an INDEXED file in the calling program (as this is in a NESTED program the file does not need to be defined in the called sub programs): SELECT TESTFILE              ASSIGN TO “TESTFILE.DAT”              ORGANIZATION IS INDEXED      

Created On:  28 March 2011 Problem: Brief entry for the number of locked records on a file. Resolution: As part of the Acu suite of products, you can make calls to the Acu File handler, I$IO. The current documentation for the op-code 4 (INFO-FUNCTION) mode -6 is:        'Returns the number of currently locked records for the file handle passed to I$IO.' This could be read as the call will return the total number of locks that are held against a particular vision file. This is not the case. In fact, the call will return the number of locks that the current process has on the file.Also, the documentation does not give the definition of the data type that is returned by this call. In fact it is a 4 digit number, so it should be defined as a Pic 9(4). Incident# 2506525 Old KB# 33774

Created On:  30 March 2011 Problem: When animating any COBOL programs that contains Linkage Section fields in Net Express, the Change button to allow editing of the value of these fields is disabled. The other buttons, such as Monitor and Add to List, are enabled. Resolution: Reinstalling the product fixes this problem. Incident #2459848 Old KB# 33810

Created On:  29 March 2011 Problem: In order to use data compression (for native unmanaged projects) in files you needed to link in CBLDC001.OBJ, CBLDC003.OBJ ...  but Visual COBOL no longer handles .obj files. Resolution: The compression routines are now handled by the Filehandler in Visual COBOL. There is no need to specify the .obj files for this. You can make the calls to the routine in the usual manner:Call "CBLDC001" ... Incident #2505376 Old KB# 33789

Created On:  29 March 2011 Problem: When running a form designer in Net Express 5.1 you get an error message indicating:Internet Explorer 4.01 or greater is requiredThis error message appears even though you have a higher version of Internet Explorer installed. Resolution: You will need to install the latest WrapPack for Net Express 5.1 so that this error message disappears and you can continue working with the form deisgner.You can download the WrapPack from the SupportLine website:   www.microfocus.com/supportline Old KB# 33790

Created On:  30 March 2011 Problem: My system response is slow on some pages, what are the proper timeout settings? Resolution: EnterpriseLink Server uses timeout configuration settings to decide how much time to wait between responses from the host system and when connecting and disconnecting from the host system. These can be found under http://localhost/stadmin - > Configuration - > EnterpriseLink Server. Here is an explanation of these settings: Session Timeout Specify a value in seconds that represents the amount of time that a browser must be idle before the session is disconnected by EnterpriseLink. The default is 1800 seconds (30 minutes). New Page Timeout Specify a value in seconds that represents the maximum amount of time EnterpriseLink Server waits when connecting to a host for the first time. If the host responds earlier than the given value, the screen is translated into the page and the page is sent to the browser. This is also the timeout used when

Created On:  30 March 2011 Problem: CTRL C and CTRL Break do not cause a loop to break from a character based application. Resolution: This problem has been identified in the base version of Net Express 5.0, and it cannot be reproduced in Net Express 5.0 WrapPack 4 or in Net Express 5.1. The resolution to this problem is then to apply WrapPack 4 or the latest WrapPack of Net Express 5.0 or upgrade to Net Express 5.1. Incident #2456450 Old KB# 33812

Created On:  06 April 2011 Problem: An obscure error was encountered on a customer’s machine when attempting to open the Net Express IDE: Error C0000005 Access Violation at 042FAE7B 01:00019E7B C:\\Program Files Micro Focus Net Express 5.1\\Base\\Bin\\mfio.dll The IDE was not trying to load the last project at startup and there had previously been no issues with projects etc. Nothing seemed to point to why we were getting this error when simply attempting to open the IDE. This happened with Net Express 5.1 on Windows 7, although we believe the same may have occurred on an XP machine. Resolution: We checked all system and user environment variable settings but nothing seemed obvious. After some discussion they said they had added some configuration options to their cobopt.cfg file, which was being pointed to by the COBCONFIG_ environment variable. This had been set in the ‘User’ environment variables in Windows – i.e. Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings &

Created On:  30 March 2011 Problem: Installing Net Express 5.1 WrapPack 1 (NXP3251010074.exe) as administrator fails on Windows 7 with the following Microsoft Installer error:Error 1406.Could not write value CUSTOM_START_MENU_CMD to key \\SOFTWARE\\Micro Focus\\NetExpress\\5.1\\Setup. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.The above error indicates that MS Installer failed to write a value to a registry key. Resolution: Make sure your user id or the Administrators group that your user id belongs to actually has Full Control over HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software, and their respective subkeys.This error may also occur if a prior attempt to install the product failed, especially from the original CD, which is already known to fail on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. If that is the case, then the install has left behind some corrupted registry keys.If there are no other Micro Focus products installed, you

Created On:  03 April 2011 Problem: I installed SP1 WP1 for Studio 6.0 and the install had no errors.  Upon opening NetExpress I receive the error:Product file does not contain a version string.  The project was not saved correctly after it was created.  The only option is to click OK on this error.  Once the IDE opened, I received the error:Could not location configuration file the VISPRF.CFG file needed to rebuild project.I received this error when trying to open an existing project and also could not open a new project, received this error in that instance as well. Resolution: Check that there is a file called SYSTEM.DAT in the following folder:  C:\\Documents and Settings\\All Users\\Application Data\\Micro Focus\\NetExpress\\5.0  Then, make sure you have full control on this folder. Customer added a system.dat here but the problem continued.  He uses his own directory - not all users - so had him add there and now he can open NE

Created On:  06 April 2011 Problem: Does any one know how to call Twitter as a web service from within a Visual COBOL application? Resolution: If you use the TweetSharp library at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/ and follow the instructions on the web site to download the binaries and get an OAuth key from Twitter then the following code will work to connect to Twitter and get a list of public Tweets.Steps:1. Download binaries .zip file from TweetSharp site and unzip it into folder called C:\\tweetsharp.2. Create a Visual COBOL managed Console project.3. Under Project right click References->Add a reference, then browse and select C:\\tweetsharp\\lib\\4.0\\tweetsharp.dll.4. Register your application with Twitter to get a Consumer Key and Consumer Secret number so you can authorize.5. When you run the code below, (after replacing the ConsumerKey and ConsumerSecret values with the values that Twitter gives you) it will open up a Twitter page that will ask you to allow