The COBOL Program and COBOL Copybook entities

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 file. 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 can also add values by redefining them explicitly.

You generate a COBOL Program or a COBOL Copybook by right-clicking the instance in the Design Explorer view and selecting Generate > Generate COBOL source. 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 Open with > PDP COBOL Editor.

You will then have access to the Design and the Generated Code Structure views where you can see, modify, restore, and generate the code again more easily.
Note: In this version, the Design view is empty.
You can modify the generated code by completing one of the following actions:
  • Insert specific code directly.
  • Call a Static Micropattern to insert code at the end of a tag or at the insertion location. You can then describe a Micropattern that will be taken into account upon the next generations. You can parameterize the values of its fields. You add this Static Micropattern from the Snippets view, category RPP SDK Micropattern snippet > Static Micropattern for COBOL.
  • Create micropatterns with the dedicated Java™ API and call them in the generated code.

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