ACUCOBOL windowing in Visual COBOL?

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 19 August 2011]

I'm looking into migrating a system to Visual COBOL (at which I am a complete newbie) from Server Express 5.1. I threw the 268 programs that I have into the evaluation copy of VC for Eclipse and 265 of them compiled. The remaining three are quite important, as they are routines to handle pop-up windows, which we use a fair bit. They use the ACUCOBOL windowing syntax, which is implemented on Server Express by using the "window1" preprocessor directive. However, VC isn't happy with this. My understanding is that VC was partly introduced as a way of bringing ACUCOBOL, RM/COBOL and MF COBOL together, so I imagine that there is a way of using this syntax. I've tried omitting the preprocess directive completely, but that throws up compilation errors. Could anyone tell me what I need to do?

Have you tried compiling with ACU directive?

ref: http://documentation.microfocus.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.microfocus.eclipse.infocenter.visualcobol.r4vc/GUID-D8B9775C-9A4B-4C58-A49C-BCEC035F2252.html
ref: http://documentation.microfocus.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.microfocus.eclipse.infocenter.visualcobol.r4vc/GUID-D8B9775C-9A4B-4C58-A49C-BCEC035F2252.html

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 19 August 2011]

I'm looking into migrating a system to Visual COBOL (at which I am a complete newbie) from Server Express 5.1. I threw the 268 programs that I have into the evaluation copy of VC for Eclipse and 265 of them compiled. The remaining three are quite important, as they are routines to handle pop-up windows, which we use a fair bit. They use the ACUCOBOL windowing syntax, which is implemented on Server Express by using the "window1" preprocessor directive. However, VC isn't happy with this. My understanding is that VC was partly introduced as a way of bringing ACUCOBOL, RM/COBOL and MF COBOL together, so I imagine that there is a way of using this syntax. I've tried omitting the preprocess directive completely, but that throws up compilation errors. Could anyone tell me what I need to do?

Thanks for that. I've now tried compiling with the ACU directive (after removing the SPZERO which is incompatible with ACU, which has been used as a substitute for proper coding by my predecessors) and I get

COBCH1544E ACU ACCEPT/DISPLAY extension is not supported

so I suspect I might need to use the ACUOPT directive and specify a particular ACUCOBOL directive but the documentation tells me to look at my ACUCOBOL documentation, of which I am sadly devoid.

I've also found that one of the programs crashes VC Eclipse when I try to load it into the IDE editor. It's not exactly huge but VC Eclipse disappears while building the object model:

$set acu

program-id. pnclosew.

linkage section.

01 lk-active-window pic x(10).

procedure division using lk-active-window.

main section.

close window lk-active-window.

goback.


Is it something I'm doing? Other programs (including the other two using ACUCOBOL syntax) don't crash it, though I haven't been through every single one.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 19 August 2011]

I'm looking into migrating a system to Visual COBOL (at which I am a complete newbie) from Server Express 5.1. I threw the 268 programs that I have into the evaluation copy of VC for Eclipse and 265 of them compiled. The remaining three are quite important, as they are routines to handle pop-up windows, which we use a fair bit. They use the ACUCOBOL windowing syntax, which is implemented on Server Express by using the "window1" preprocessor directive. However, VC isn't happy with this. My understanding is that VC was partly introduced as a way of bringing ACUCOBOL, RM/COBOL and MF COBOL together, so I imagine that there is a way of using this syntax. I've tried omitting the preprocess directive completely, but that throws up compilation errors. Could anyone tell me what I need to do?

I have tried your program in the latest sources of the Eclipse IDE and can confirm that it does indeed crash during the creation of the SourceModel while background parsing the program.
Out of interest, it seems to be the 'close' statement in this particular program which is sending it off into an infinite loop.
I have raised a bug report for it (RPI number 585298). Many thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Regards,
Darren.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 19 August 2011]

I'm looking into migrating a system to Visual COBOL (at which I am a complete newbie) from Server Express 5.1. I threw the 268 programs that I have into the evaluation copy of VC for Eclipse and 265 of them compiled. The remaining three are quite important, as they are routines to handle pop-up windows, which we use a fair bit. They use the ACUCOBOL windowing syntax, which is implemented on Server Express by using the "window1" preprocessor directive. However, VC isn't happy with this. My understanding is that VC was partly introduced as a way of bringing ACUCOBOL, RM/COBOL and MF COBOL together, so I imagine that there is a way of using this syntax. I've tried omitting the preprocess directive completely, but that throws up compilation errors. Could anyone tell me what I need to do?

We're also Acucobol customers considering migration to Visual COBOL. Working with an evaluation copy of Eclipse & Visual COBOL, and I'm getting the same error message as MikeF posted in this thread:

COBCH1544E ACU ACCEPT/DISPLAY extension is not supported

I'm running with the ACU directive. Was going to try the ACUOPT directive, but couldn't see how a compiler option would figure in here. I didn't see an answer regarding this error; did it get resolved?

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 19 August 2011]

I'm looking into migrating a system to Visual COBOL (at which I am a complete newbie) from Server Express 5.1. I threw the 268 programs that I have into the evaluation copy of VC for Eclipse and 265 of them compiled. The remaining three are quite important, as they are routines to handle pop-up windows, which we use a fair bit. They use the ACUCOBOL windowing syntax, which is implemented on Server Express by using the "window1" preprocessor directive. However, VC isn't happy with this. My understanding is that VC was partly introduced as a way of bringing ACUCOBOL, RM/COBOL and MF COBOL together, so I imagine that there is a way of using this syntax. I've tried omitting the preprocess directive completely, but that throws up compilation errors. Could anyone tell me what I need to do?

We're also Acucobol customers considering migration to Visual COBOL. Working with an evaluation copy of Eclipse & Visual COBOL, and I'm getting the same error message as MikeF posted in this thread:

COBCH1544E ACU ACCEPT/DISPLAY extension is not supported

I'm running with the ACU directive. Was going to try the ACUOPT directive, but couldn't see how a compiler option would figure in here. I didn't see an answer regarding this error; did it get resolved?

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 19 August 2011]

I'm looking into migrating a system to Visual COBOL (at which I am a complete newbie) from Server Express 5.1. I threw the 268 programs that I have into the evaluation copy of VC for Eclipse and 265 of them compiled. The remaining three are quite important, as they are routines to handle pop-up windows, which we use a fair bit. They use the ACUCOBOL windowing syntax, which is implemented on Server Express by using the "window1" preprocessor directive. However, VC isn't happy with this. My understanding is that VC was partly introduced as a way of bringing ACUCOBOL, RM/COBOL and MF COBOL together, so I imagine that there is a way of using this syntax. I've tried omitting the preprocess directive completely, but that throws up compilation errors. Could anyone tell me what I need to do?

We're also Acucobol customers considering migration to Visual COBOL. Working with an evaluation copy of Eclipse & Visual COBOL, and I'm getting the same error message as MikeF posted in this thread:

COBCH1544E ACU ACCEPT/DISPLAY extension is not supported

I'm running with the ACU directive. Was going to try the ACUOPT directive, but couldn't see how a compiler option would figure in here. I didn't see an answer regarding this error; did it get resolved?

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 19 August 2011]

I'm looking into migrating a system to Visual COBOL (at which I am a complete newbie) from Server Express 5.1. I threw the 268 programs that I have into the evaluation copy of VC for Eclipse and 265 of them compiled. The remaining three are quite important, as they are routines to handle pop-up windows, which we use a fair bit. They use the ACUCOBOL windowing syntax, which is implemented on Server Express by using the "window1" preprocessor directive. However, VC isn't happy with this. My understanding is that VC was partly introduced as a way of bringing ACUCOBOL, RM/COBOL and MF COBOL together, so I imagine that there is a way of using this syntax. I've tried omitting the preprocess directive completely, but that throws up compilation errors. Could anyone tell me what I need to do?

The ACU Windowing syntax which was present under Net Express/Server Express using the window1 preprocessor directive is currently not supported in the Visual COBOL product.

An enhancement request for this feature was made and it is being considered for inclusion in a future version.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 19 August 2011]

I'm looking into migrating a system to Visual COBOL (at which I am a complete newbie) from Server Express 5.1. I threw the 268 programs that I have into the evaluation copy of VC for Eclipse and 265 of them compiled. The remaining three are quite important, as they are routines to handle pop-up windows, which we use a fair bit. They use the ACUCOBOL windowing syntax, which is implemented on Server Express by using the "window1" preprocessor directive. However, VC isn't happy with this. My understanding is that VC was partly introduced as a way of bringing ACUCOBOL, RM/COBOL and MF COBOL together, so I imagine that there is a way of using this syntax. I've tried omitting the preprocess directive completely, but that throws up compilation errors. Could anyone tell me what I need to do?

What I did in the end was rewrite the modules concerned to use PANELS. The documentation is here. I only had four modules to rewrite, it would have been a different proposition if we'd had large numbers.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 19 August 2011]

I'm looking into migrating a system to Visual COBOL (at which I am a complete newbie) from Server Express 5.1. I threw the 268 programs that I have into the evaluation copy of VC for Eclipse and 265 of them compiled. The remaining three are quite important, as they are routines to handle pop-up windows, which we use a fair bit. They use the ACUCOBOL windowing syntax, which is implemented on Server Express by using the "window1" preprocessor directive. However, VC isn't happy with this. My understanding is that VC was partly introduced as a way of bringing ACUCOBOL, RM/COBOL and MF COBOL together, so I imagine that there is a way of using this syntax. I've tried omitting the preprocess directive completely, but that throws up compilation errors. Could anyone tell me what I need to do?

Mike,

Thanks so much for taking the time to post your solution!