Dialog System

Have you looked at this tutorial ? It should hopefully give you some information:

https://www.microfocus.com/documentation/visual-cobol/vc100/VS2022/H2WFWFFRMW.html

Good morning:

Thank you very much for your advice Gael, good day...

Alejandro,

There are examples showing how you can use Dialog System screens and Winforms in the product. If you run the Visual COBOL Samples application, select 'Show Dialog System only' in the drop down and if you then select 'Dialog System - Moving to .NET' or 'Dialog System with .NET User Controls' you can see the examples.

Note however, that Dialog System is only available for 32-bit applications. In your initial post you mentioned 64-bit so combining Winforms and Dialog System screens directly in such a scenario would not be possible, you would have to have separate processes for the Dialog System screens and Winforms. 

Good day:

 

Thank you very much for your instructions, we are executing the instructions that are in the Sample but, when performing the build we find the error "COBCH1569 Could not load ILPINVOKE file '%1$s' "The .dll file specified by the ILPINVOKE Compiler directive does not exist or cannot be located.

 

We are working to solve this error and be able to carry out the corresponding instructions.

 

Thank you very much, have a good day

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alejandro rodriguez mancera
consulting II
Rocket Forum Shared Account
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It appears like the reference to dsgrun.dll is specifying the incorrect location.

If you open the References folder under the main project name, delete dsgrun.dll from the list.

Then you need to add it back by right clicking in the References folder and selecting Add Reference. When the dialog is displayed select Browse and navigate to the location C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Micro Focus\\Visual COBOL\\bin and select the file dsgrun.dll.

The sample should then work.

Good day:

 

Thank you very much for your instructions, we are executing the instructions that are in the Sample but, when performing the build we find the error "COBCH1569 Could not load ILPINVOKE file '%1$s' "The .dll file specified by the ILPINVOKE Compiler directive does not exist or cannot be located.

 

We are working to solve this error and be able to carry out the corresponding instructions.

 

Thank you very much, have a good day

------------------------------
alejandro rodriguez mancera
consulting II
Rocket Forum Shared Account
------------------------------

Hi,

Unfortunately there appears to be a bug in the project file for that particular sample. You can resolve it by doing the following.

In Solution Explorer, right-click the project and select 'Unload project'. Then add a line below 

    <VisualCOBOLRoot Condition="'$(COBDIR)' != '' ">$(COBDIR.Split(';')[0])</VisualCOBOLRoot>

as follows :

    <VisualCOBOLRoot Condition="'$(COBDIR)' == '' ">C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Micro Focus\\Visual COBOL</VisualCOBOLRoot>

If the product has been installed to a different location, specify the location used instead. 

Then reload the project and close and reopen the solution and you should be able to build it.

You can really use any user interface, for your front-end, that is capable of calling Windows native .dlls, .NET managed .dlls or Java byte code, but it depends on your desired platform and language.  If you wish to write the UI using COBOL, in Visual Studio, we have integrated Visual COBOL with WinForms, WPF or ASP.NET for websites. You can also use other .NET languages such as C# or VB.NET. There are also 3rd party packages that you can use to develop the UI.

If you are compiling to Java byte code, which is normally done if you have the Visual COBOL Eclipse version, then your UI could be written using Java based classes like Swing, etc.

That being said, most customers, that I come in contact with have converted Dialog System to WinForms, either using COBOL or C# as the language of choice. There is no automated tool, to do this conversion, that I know of anyways. Perhaps others have some knowledge of such a tool.