Making EXTFH Libraries Available to the Runtime

To use an EXTFH interface, you must make a library available to the runtime that implements an EXTFH-compatible function and include all the necessary support libraries.

Note: The vendor of your environment must supply the libraries that contain EXTFH-compatible functions for any data sources you want to access. ACUCOBOL-GT does not supply these libraries.

Use the following procedures to make the libraries available:

  1. Specify that the file system is EXTFH.
  2. Specify the library using one of these options:
    1. Rely on the default EXTFH function names or specify one or more function names in a configuration variable.
  3. Specify a single EXTFH library name or different library names for relative, sequential, and/or indexed files using configuration variables.
  4. Relink the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime.

We recommend that you set the A_EXTFH runtime configuration variable to dynamically load the EXTFH library or use other A_EXTFH configuration variables to specify different libraries for specific file types.

Regardless of what method you use, you also need to set at least one of the file system configuration variables to access files through the EXTFH interface.