Questions about making calls to 3rd party application from COBOL program.

Problem:

When attempting to call a third party application from within a COBOL program the call does not work.

Resolution:

If a COBOL program needs to execute a third party application which exists as an executable program, i.e. .EXE extension, then the COBOL CALL statement cannot be used.

An .EXE must be run as a separate process by using the WINAPI function CreateProcessA or the COBOL library function CBL_EXEC_RUN_UNIT.

There are samples of both of these on the microfocus.com supportline web site under Examples and Utilities.