COBOL applications developed and built using previous
Micro Focus products can be developed and built with
Enterprise Developer. However, there are some differences in behavior and in terminology.
Diagnostic tools
The FaultFinder tool has been removed from the current version of
Enterprise Developer. This includes the removal of the following tunables:
- faultfind_level
- faultfind_outfile
- faultfind_recsize
- faultfind_config
- faultfind_cache_enable
You should either remove these tunables from your application or set the tunable
cobconfig_error_report=false in your configuration file.
Backward Compatibility with
Studio Enterprise Edition
- File Control Description (FCD)
- The FCD format for file handling operations in 32-bit applications defaults to FCD3 in
Enterprise Developer; in
Studio Enterprise Edition, it defaulted to FCD2.
Backward Compatibility with the Net Express and
Mainframe Express IDE
The main differences between the Net Express,
Mainframe Express and Eclipse IDEs are:
- Perspectives. The Team Developer perspective shows the views and menus relevant to COBOL and PL/I development, such as the
Application Explorer view, Program Outline, Outline and Console views. There are other perspectives for Debugging, the Interface Mapper and CTF.
- Project > Build automatically. Whenever changes to a resource are saved, an incremental build starts, which rebuilds all the resources modified since the
last build. You can force a rebuild by using
Project > Clean.
- Build settings. These are available in three places:
- Project > Properties > Micro Focus > Project Settings. You can specify any additional directives to be passed to the compiler at build time. These settings do not depend on the
active build configuration and are always passed to the compiler.
- Project > Properties > Micro Focus > Build Configurations. You can have multiple build configurations for different build scenarios and swap between them. You choose the configuration
you want to use, by setting it as the current active configuration. This then overrides the project language settings.
- Properties on the context menu for a single file. To set this, right-click the COBOL file in the
Application Explorer view. The settings are specifically for this file and they override the currently active build configuration and the Project Language
Settings.
- Debug and run configurations. You need one of these before you can debug or run a program. They are available from:
- Project > Properties > Micro Focus > Run-time Configuration. These are the run-time settings for this project, such as run-time arguments, run-time tunables, COBOL switches and so on.
- Run > Debug Configurations. Like build configurations, you can have multiple debug configurations and swap between them. These override the project
run-time configuration.
- Run > Run Configurations. These behave in the same way as debug configurations, but provide slightly different options.
- Cheat sheets. These are like tutorials and give step-by-step instructions on how to do a task, together with brief explanations.
See
Help > Cheat Sheets > COBOL Development. There are cheat sheets to:
- Create a project to say "Hello COBOL World".
- Import existing COBOL files into Eclipse
- Debug a program
Changes in some options and files delivered with the product include:
- Treatment of DBCS literals
- In Net Express, under the NCHAR directive, if an alphanumeric literal contained only DBCS characters, then the literal was
treated as class NCHAR. In
Enterprise Developer, this is not true, and you are required to prefix literals in the procedure division with N to achieve equivalent behavior
(for example:
IF N"dbcs-chars" =
data-item-1.), which is significant when performing comparisons, where NCHAR literals get padded with double byte spaces. In
Enterprise Developer, all literals that are surrounded by quotes without any character specified (B", N", etc...) are always treated as alphanumeric.
-
Note: In the following scenario, the literal is still treated as a NCHAR literal:
01 data-item pic N value "dbcs-charaters".
- ADIS
- In earlier
Micro Focus products, the default location for the ADISCTRL file was
$COBDIR. The default location of the file in
Enterprise Developer is
$COBDIR/etc.
- Default working mode
- In
versions of
Visual COBOL R4 and earlier, the default working mode set by the COBMODE environment variable was 32-bit. With the current release of
Visual COBOL and
Enterprise Developer, it is 64-bit.
- Format of the index files
- In
Net Express, the default setting of the IDXFORMAT option was 4. With the current release of
Enterprise Developer, it is 8.
- FILEMAXSIZE File Handler configuration option
-
In
Net Express, the default setting for FILEMAXSIZE was 4. With the current release of
Enterprise Developer, it is 8.
Coexisting with Earlier
Micro Focus Products
- Run-time system error due to COBCONFIG
- A run-time system error occurs if either the COBCONFIG or COBCONFIG_ environment variable is set when you run
Enterprise Developer applications or when you use
Enterprise Developer to edit or create projects and the configuration file it refers to contains entries that are not valid for
Enterprise Developer.
For example, this might happen if you have
Net Express or
Studio Enterprise Edition installed and either COBCONFIG or COBCONFIG_ is set for it.
-
To work around this issue, ensure that
Enterprise Developer is not running and then modify the configuration file by doing one of the following:
- Licensing error due to environment settings
- The message "Micro Focus License Manager service is not running" can occur when you invoke a
Net Express,
Mainframe Express or
Studio Enterprise Edition utility from
Enterprise Developer. This happens when the tool is invoked with
Enterprise Developer environment settings while it requires the
Net Express or
Studio Enterprise Edition ones.
This happens when you edit files such as .dat that have a file association with
Net Express or
Studio Enterprise Edition.
This can also happen when invoking a utility within the
Net Express or
Studio Enterprise Edition products as an external tool from
Enterprise Developer.
-
You can workaround this problem in
Enterprise Developer as follows:
- Create a batch file that unsets COBREG_PARSED before the tool is invoked. The batch file contains:
Set COBREG_PARSED=
Call [PathToUtility] %1
Where
PathToUtility is the path to the
Net Express or
Studio Enterprise Edition utility.
- In the Visual Studio IDE, add the batch file instead of the utility itself as an external tool.
This ensures that the proper environment is established when running that tool.