Rocket® COBOL

Problem: To whom should I direct questions about Cobol-RPC? Resolution: While Liant does support Cobol-RPC that is purchased through us, England Technical Services (ETS) provides direct support for the product/versions purchased from them, or through their distributors. Old KB# 4671

Problem: How can I fix a slowly query problem on Linux ES4 (CentOS 4)? Resolution: There is a known problem with version 11 (and previous versions).  However, there is a service pack available on ftp.liant.com.   Here are the instructions to install it: 1) ftp ftp.liant.com 2) Login with anonymous, using your email address as the password. 3) cd pub/rel/outgoing 4) binary 5) get reldbsrv1100SP2LNX.zip 6) bye 7) Unzip reldbsrv1100SP2LNX.zip.  The password is '30Nov07'.  Extract the contained file reldbsrv1100SP2LNX.tar. 8) Binary ftp reldbsrv1100SP2LNX.tar to the RelRM11.00 on the machine running the Data Server. 9) Login as root to the machine running the Data Server. 10) Change directory to the RelRM11.00 directory. 11) mkdir save 12) mv reldbsrv save 13) mv reldbsrv.rm save 14) mv relfm_rm.o save 15) tar xvf reldbsrv1100SP2LNX.tar 16) ln reldbsrv.rm reldbsrv 17) ./STOP 18) If the Dat

Problem: How do I fix a "duplicate presentation sequence" error? Resolution: Chances are this error is coming from very old version of Relativity, since this problem was fixed in version 4.2.  However, the cause may actually be in the catalog. If so, you will need to use the attached utility to fix it. If you are running an earlier version than 4.2 and still get this error after trying the utility, then you will need upgrade to the latest version of Relativity. To fix the catalog with the attached utility, follow these steps: 1. Close the datasource completely if it is open under the Relativity Designer or other ODBC access tool. 2. Double click on the reldbfix.exe icon. 3. Select the datasource containing the tables that generate the "Duplicate Presentation Sequence" error message. 4. Select "Repair sequence numbers" from the list of available actions. 5. Press the OK button. 6. Enter login information for the catalog.  &

Problem: How can I do a ProtocolTrace on the Windows client side? Resolution: You can enable TCP/IP protocol tracing on the client side with the following: 1. Back up your registry, then with regedt32 add a key to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\ODBC\\ODBCINST.INI\\ named "Simba Client" 2. In the "Simba Client" key add these String Values: ProtocolTrace and TraceOutput 3. Set ProtocolTrace equal to 7 4. Set TraceOutput to the desired trace file name (ex: C:\\temp\\trace.log) in the same section. Produce the output and send the log file to Liant support.      Old KB# 4649

Problem: How can I convert an alpha string to uppercase? Resolution: See the attached source code example. Attachments: upper.cbl Old KB# 4683

Problem: What is ODBCtest, and how can I get it? Resolution: Microsoft ODBC Test is an ODBC-enabled application that you can use to test ODBC drivers and the ODBC Driver Manager. To get it, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads and search for MDAC. You should find a page where you can download the latest version of this product, of which ODBCtest (ODBCTE32.EXE) is a part: Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC)      Old KB# 4651

Problem: How can I convert a 6 digit date to an 8 digit date? Resolution: Please see the attached Cobol program sample code. Attachments: cnvtdate.cbl Old KB# 4684

Problem: How do I manually install the RM/COBOL Use Count Service on Vista? Resolution: You can manually install the RM/COBOL Use Count Service on Windows Vista by using the rmucs utility ( rmucs.exe) located in the RM/COBOL installation directory. Below is the rmucs usage information: rmucs /help rmucs [-install] [-start] [-stop] [-uninstall] If this service is not able to run properly, you will get the following error: Error invoking unauthorized copy of runtime. Windows function error (Loc 508).      Old KB# 4687

Problem: If you encounter an issue with the Relativity Data Client, Data Server, or, Data Manager, you can obtain additional information about the failure by enabling a Microsoft Windows ODBC trace. Resolution: You can enable the Microsoft Windows ODBC tracing facility with the following: 1. Go to the Windows control panel. 2. Double-click on Administrative Tools. 3. Double-click on Data Sources(ODBC).  If this is a 32-bit product running on 64-bit Windows, you will need to use the 32-bit ODBC Administrator (C:\\Windows\\SysWOW64\\odbcad32.exe). 4. Double-click on the Tracing tab. 5. In the Log File Path, choose where you want the log file to be created. 6. When you want to begin logging, click the button labeled: "Start Tracing Now" You should enable tracing right before causing the error to occur. **After the error message has occurred, turn off tracing to reduce overhead.

Problem: How do I use the RM/COBOL LIKE condition? Resolution: The LIKE condition Using the LIKE condition is a relatively effortless way to match the content of any display data item against a pattern that can express just about any possible desired value. For example, suppose your program needs to verify that the user has entered a well-formed email address in a form field. Let's say a well-formed email address satisfies the following rules: 1. Leading and trailing spaces are ignored. 2. Preceding a single required "at sign" character ("@"), there are one or more characters from the set of "word" characters, (digits, uppercase and lowercase letters), plus the period, hyphen, and underscore characters. 3. After the "at sign", there are one or more "word" characters, plus the hyphen and underscore characters, followed by a period. 4. Rule 3 can be repeated one or more times. 5. Finally, two to four uppercase or l

Problem: How can I import Excel data using XML? Resolution: Modern versions of Microsoft Excel have the ability to save a spreadsheet in the form of an XML document.  This is accomplished by using the 'XML Spreadsheet' option of the 'Save as type:'.  The resulting XML document is quite rich in the detail saved for the spreadsheet, including formulae used to produce cells, as well as cell values.  You may refer to the Microsoft web site for more information about this particular XML specification, named SpreadsheetML.  There are also several books devoted to using XML in the Office suite. Using XML Extensions, one can import virtually any detail of the resulting spreadsheet.  The attached example demonstrates the most common requirement: importing the actual data values from the sheet.  The example XSLT (XML translating stylesheet) assumes that the first row contains column labels, and determines whic

Problem: What is Unicode, UTF-8, ContentType and such? Resolution: Before you do anything at all with the web, or try to figure out Unicode, you should read this article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html      Old KB# 4672

Problem: Does RM/COBOL take advantage of multiple processors? Resolution: Yes, provided there are enough users to cause the CPU to be a bottleneck.  While the RM/COBOL runtime component uses a single processor thread for running the application instance, multiple application instances can use multiple processors simultaneously, both for the application code and the file i/o processing. So, if the CPU is a bottleneck is due to load from multiple users of the application(s), then the more processors the better.  If the CPU is not the bottleneck, or a single user is alone saturating the CPU, then more processors will make no difference. Si, con tal que haya bastantes usuarios para hacer la CPU ser un embotellamiento. Mientras el componente RM/COBOL Runtime utiliza un procesador hilo (thread) para correr un caso de la aplicación, múltiples casos de aplicaciones pueden utilizar múltiple procesadores simultáneamente, para ambos el c

Problem: How can I use JDBC with Relativity on Windows XP? Resolution: The JDBC client application needs to communicate with a server, so you must be running Relativity Data Server, not Relativity Data Manager, on Windows XP.  JDBC clients have no mechanism to connect to Relativity Data Manager other than the use of a JDBC-to-ODBC bridge, which is not recommended. Old KB# 4645

Problem: How can I reindex the output from RECOVER2? Resolution: Please see the attached source code sample. Attachments: reindex.cbl Old KB# 4667

Problem: How can I change TERMCAP and TERMINFO entries to work with my program? Resolution: Terminal Interfaces The RM/COBOL runtime system uses two terminal interface mechanisms, TERMCAP and TERMINFO, to control cursor positioning, video display attributes, and function key mapping. TERMCAP and TERMINFO databases are supplied by the operating system manufacturer. However, these databases may not contain complete entries for the terminal you are using, and as a result, certain capabilities used by the RM/COBOL runtime will not operate properly. The RM/COBOL User's Guide documents the TERMCAP and TERMINFO capabilities used by the RM/COBOL runtime. This page includes sample TERMCAP and TERMINFO entries for some of the more popular terminals. (See below.) These sample entries are provided for your convenience as examples only. Liant assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of these sample entries. Although the Support staff can assist you with general q

Problem: What does the error "The system file is not suitable" mean? Resolution: If you get the following message during installation: "16-bit MS-DOS Subsystem C:\\Windows\\System32\\Autoexec.nt. The system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows applications. Choose 'Close' to terminate the application" There is a well documented problem in Windows XP SP2 that sometimes causes the autoexec.nt file to disappear. When this happens, running 16-bit applications will generate this message. C:\\Windows\\repair should have a backup copy of this file.      Old KB# 4673

Problem: Is the Runtime CLUSTER aware? Resolution: RM/COBOL is not coded to any specific hardware platform or operating system. Therefore, there are no real optimizations for clustered or multiprocessor computing environments. Both RM/COBOL and InfoExpress are coded as single-threaded processes. Any parallelism that exists in the code would have to be extracted through the operating system and/or hardware of the machine. Even then, InfoExpress would be faster running on one server, with a sufficiently fast CPU and I/O subsystem, than using NFS. InfoExpress's strength is in it's ability to manage files that are being accessed by many concurrent users. RM/COBOL does not handle any of the locking process, but asks the operating system for a lock to occur and let's the operating system handle the actual locking of the file. Unfortunately, this means we are unable to optimize the locking mechanism as it is out of our control.      Old

Problem: Are there any Runtime performance considerations? Resolution: Taking the default settings will give the most consistant performance ratings. Be careful not to increase buffer size to the size that the OS has to consider increased swapping, or the Runtime will lose performance. It has been found that the defaults allow the file I/O to execute at optimum levels. Old KB# 4659

Problem: How can you change the columns and rows for the runtime display? Resolution: You can use a configuration file and setup a TERM-ATTR configuration record and define the COLUMNS and ROWS which will be displayed on the terminal screen. A sample configuration file is in the installation folder, called WINDOWS.CFG. Old KB# 4660

Problem: How can I assign a file name when printing to Adobe Acrobat PDF Writer? Resolution: Define the name of the file to print in the SELECT statement as ACROBAT. In the Windows Runtime configuration file, (runcobol.cfg), define the new device: DEFINE-DEVICE  DEVICE=ACROBAT    PATH=" Adobe PDF". In the program, use the "P$SetDocumentName" and assign a name that is incremented each time you print. Disable the property for the printer that asks for the name of the file to print. The attached example uses a free PDF file creator : Cute PDF      Attachments: pdf.zip Old KB# 4685

Problem: How can I define decimal numbers with ODBCLink/SE and InstantSQL? Resolution: In order to get numbers with fractional parts (i.e. decimals) the SQL data type must be SQL_DECIMAL.  The Image data types that convert to SQL_DECIMAL are: DECIMAL (Internal representation is packed decimal) Image Zoned (Z) Image Packed (P) Image I3 (48-bit integer) Image I4 (64-bit integer) It is certainly possible to have a BINARY (i.e. 32-bit integer physical storage) data item use a picture such as PIC 9(6)v99 -- at least this is possible in RM/COBOL, and is required by the COBOL standard.  So this might be the case where the implementation is overloading an underlying integer data type with a decimal scale factor (the V99 part of the PIC) that is not known to the Image database per se.   It would be interesting to find some capability of configuring the ODBC driver so that it will return SQL_DECIMAL for those Image fields that are described in COBOL

Problem: Can my COBOL program call a Windows DLL? Resolution: Yes, it can - if you construct a COBOL-callable DLL that in turn calls the non-COBOL DLL.   The CodeBridge capability that comes with the RM/COBOL development system makes that task very easy in most cases.  Little or no DLL programming is required if CodeBridge can be used.      Old KB# 4643

Problem: How can I fix 30, 64 errors on my Windows systems? Resolution: A 30, 64 error is an Microsoft Windows error. According to the Microsoft, it stands for "ERROR_NETNAME_DELETED" and means: "The specified network name is no longer available." Here are some suggestions that might help. 1. Turn off opportunistic locking on the data Server. In the SupportTools folder execute the "suptool1.exe rmccheck" from a command prompt. You can also execute "suptool1 contents" for a complete list of the Window tools available. 2. Turn off auto disconnect. See the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;138365 3. Update network card drivers to the latest version. 4. Read the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article on troubleshooting network problems: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];325487 5. Some customers who have experienced 30,64 errors have been

Problem: How to check if Windows opportunistic locking or write behind are set? Resolution: In the SupportTools folder execute the "suptool1.exe rmccheck" from a command prompt. You can also execute "suptool1 contents" for a complete list of the Window tools available. Old KB# 4689