These entities are dedicated to the management of the COBOL code. When their instances are created, they must reference a Skeleton that has a COBOL type. This skeleton contains the basic structure of their COBOL code. After you generate the instances, you can modify their generated code. If you generate again, your modifications are kept.
The design of these two entities is almost identical. The only difference is the field that corresponds to the name of the generated program. It is named COBOL Program ID for a COBOL Program and COBOL Copybook ID for a COBOL Copybook.
You can assign values to variables that are declared in the Skeleton.
You generate a COBOL Program or a COBOL Copybook by right-clicking the instance in the Design Explorer view and selecting . The generation produces a file under the instance: a cbl file for a COBOL Program and a cpy file for a COBOL Copybook.
You can then open and modify this file by double-clicking it or by right-clicking it and selecting
.