Advanced Debug Launch Configurations

Note:
  • This functionality requires a licensed version of a Micro Focus Visual COBOL or Enterprise Developer product on the same machine. See Installation for details.
  • The following information applies to native COBOL code.

You can create additional launch configurations for other debugging scenarios in the launch.json file:

Some of the settings you can specify are:

Example - enable CTF tracing

In order to enable CTF tracing for the COBOL program being run, you need to add the following setting:
"env": [ {"name": "MFTRACE_CONFIG", "value": "d:\\trace.cfg" }]

This does not, on its own, result in CTF output in the DEBUG CONSOLE.

If, however, the CTF configuration file has the idedbg emitter set then CTF output will be displayed in the DEBUG CONSOLE. The idedbg emitter is only available on Windows and therefore the output will only be displayed in the DEBUG CONSOLE on Windows.

As an alternative, on Linux platforms the content of the textfile emitter can be viewed in Visual Studio Code as it is written by opening the Terminal and running the tail command using:

 tail -f <path-to-emitter-file>

For more about CTF Tracing, see the product Help of Micro Focus Visual COBOL or Enterprise Developer.