What is invloved in migrating from RM Cobol to Visual Cobol.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 11 May 2011]

5/11/2011

I am currently using RM COBOL with SP2. My company wants to move to a web application with a SQL Server back end. We are looking at Visual COBOL.

Can anybody give me a basic migration path? I know we will have to remove all of the SP2 code but will I have to convert my current programs to classes? Is there a conversion tool that will take my FD's and make tables from them?

Since this is a major undertaking and will take a lot of time to develop, we want to be able to develop our new system and keep adding features to our current application that is in the field. Will we have to maintain 2 code sets?

Is there a way to leverage the functionality of our current code base without changing the program?

5/12/2011
This is the second time I have posted this question and no one has replied. Someone from Micro Focus must have some information on this topic.

Any information would be appreciated.
Bill

To move to a Web application in Visual COBOL I would suggest that you look at using ASP.NET in Visual Studio 2010.
It is not necessary to migrate all of your existing procedural COBOL programs to classes.

You can create the actual Web Pages using ASP.NET Web Forms and you can call the procedural COBOL code from within the methods generated for the events of the Web Form.

Because a Web Application is multithreaded you should look at using the RunUnit class within the MicroFocus.COBOL.RuntimeServices class.

See MicroFocus.COBOL.RuntimeServices documentation.

The amount of conversion that you will have to do to your programs depends on which RM features that you use.
See RM Conversion documentation here.

Although Visual COBOL does provide for RM compatibility directives these are currently only available in native code and therefore cannot be used in an ASP.NET managed code application.

I do not know of any automated tools available that will create SQL table entries directly from your FDs but somebody else might chime in here if they do.

For SQL programming we provide both connected and disconnected type statements that support both EXEC SQL and EXEC ADO embedded statement support.

For a demonstration of an ASP.NET Web Application using Visual COBOL and SQL Server see the MF ASP.NET Shopping Cart Demo here.