The simplest (and tested) answer is to rebuild the .car file in Visual COBOL.

Note that when the .car file was created in Server Express, the user may have chosen the option to include the compiled COBOL objects (.int, .gnt, or .so files) for the Web Service within the .car file. Any Server Express-built COBOL objects are not supported in Visual COBOL, and would need to be rebuilt.

Thanks for the solution. However we have a large number of car  files and by rebuild I assume you mean we will have to manually recreate them. Will there be any faster way where we can import or migrate the existing car files from the Server Express installation   

After some additional research, I've been advised that Micro Focus has seen other customers successfully use .car files from Server Express in Visual COBOL.

In case you haven't seen it, there is a documentation page that lists various methods of deploying Service Interfaces to Enterprise Server. Since you are starting from existing .car files, the option to use mfdepinst to deploy from the .car file might be a good method.

Thanks for the suggestion, We are also shifting to 64 bit so we have decided to rebuild them anyway as old SE ones were 32 bit,,  However that has given rise to a new problem.

Our new environment is Visual COBOL 6.0. We  have created a Cobol copybook project and a Cobol program project. The build path of Cobol program project points to the copybook project that has all copybooks (with a variety of extensions such as *.pr, *,dd and many others 

Everything worked fine for main compilations of the programs. However when we tried to create a SOAP interface we got truckloads of errors on programs that were compiling fine in VC 6.0. The reason for the errors was that the interface mapping designer in VC 6.0 is not using the Copybook project while the Visual COBOL compilation process uses the copybook project and hence compiles clean 

Any ideas on how to make the copy handling of the interface designer match with that Visual Cobol 6.0 

Apologies for the delay in responding. Can you let me know whether you are using the base version of Visual COBOL for Eclipse 6.0, or perhaps have installed a Patch Update? One easy way to see this information from the Eclipse menu is to go to Help->Micro Focus->Product Information. Then, copy the text from the middle of the "Product Information" pop-up, which shows detailed version information. For example, these lines may look like:

Version: 6.0.00267

Update level: PU 04

Also, are you running Eclipse locally on the Unix/Linux machine, or perhaps using it remotely from a Windows desktop? If using Eclipse remotely, is the Visual COBOL Development Hub product in use running the same version and patch update level as the Eclipse IDE?

Next, please try the following:

1) In the Eclipse IDE, click on the Console view, and then on its toolbar locate the icon named "Display Selected Console". Click the dropdown next to that icon, and select "Service Interfaces Console".

2) Right click the within that Console, and choose "clear" so that the console is empty

3) Next, wherever you've specified your compile options, check the box labeled "verbose"

4) Try again to generate the Service Interface, preferably for one of your smaller COBOL programs

5) Copy the contents of the "Service Interfaces Console", save it in a file, and attach it to this discussion

I'll take a look and see if I can make any suggestions.

Blair