Chapter 5: Class Library

This chapter lists differences in the Class Library compared to Object COBOL and Workbench.

The Class Library in Net Express uses the Win32 API, as does that in Visual Object COBOL V1.0; whereas the one in Object COBOL and Workbench use Panels V2. Some of the differences result from this change.

5.1 Summary of Changes

The differences are:

Methods that return the dimensions of a window, such as GetWidth, GetHeight, and GetRectangle, include decorations (such as borders and title bar) in the dimensions. In Object COBOL and Workbench they include only the client area. Net Express has some new methods, such as GetClientWidthHeight, to get the dimensions of the client area.
In the class VirtualWindows, the page increment for the scroll bars is automatically calculated. In Object COBOL and Workbench you have to pass the increment. Also, in Net Express you can change the virtual size of a window more than once, using the method SetVirtualWidthHeight. In Object COBOL and Workbench you could change it only once.
Events on GUI objects are identified by event objects. In Object COBOL and Workbench they are identified by group items for communicating with Panels V2. For each event, you need to declare an object reference, to contain the object.
Sidefiles are not supported. When you specify something like a bitmap or icon, you need to load it from its resource rather than specify a string.
Change your code as follows. Pass the string containing the name of the .dll file to method NewZ of class Module, then pass the returned module object and the resource-ID to the resource class, for example IconData. Then pass the instance returned of the source class to the original methods.
Exception messages when you are running in GUI mode are displayed in a message box.

COBOL System Library Routines

Directives and Dialects