cobol, COBDATA Tool source available at last

The complete procedural COBOL, OO COBOL and C# source code for the COBDATA
COBOL Structure analysis tool is finally posted and downloadable from the
cobol21 site: http://primacomputing.co.nz/cobol21

It was delayed for the following reasons (apart from the need to find tthe
time to do it...):

1. We couldn't really post source code until we were pretty sure it was
stable. The last known bugs in the package have been fixed.

I was notified by private mail that the tool stopped after processing
200 lines of a COBOL FD/01 definition. This was not by design and it wasn't
deliberately "nobbled" because it was free :-) This has been increased to
500 lines, but if anyone finds this still to be a limitation, please send me
a copy of your COBOL source definition and I'll see what I can do.

2. It was a huge task to gather all the various sources together with the
support they need, and get this into a single archive.

Some quick points about the archive:

1. It is WinZip; some people may have their Browser set to prohibit this.
2. Please sort the archive by path before extracting it. (Just click on the
path heading in the archive view)
3. It is around 8 MB.
4. ReadMe files are provided for each section of the archive.

I see from the site logs that around a dozen people have tried to download
the source and I can only say I'm sorry and please try again :-)

Around 60 people have downloaded the tool executable, and I understand that
some of them are using it every day for data flow analyses and even for
creating legacy metadata on Relational DBs. Neither Robert nor myself could
have foreseen some of these uses. I remember a few comments at the time
along the lines of "the compiler can do that if you ask it to" ...This was
fair comment and completely true, if all you want is a printout of elements,
offsets, and lengths.

But now we are finding people using the tool in ways we didn't think of at
the time it was written. The compiler generally cannot read your COBOL
source from the system clipboard or allow you to paste its output precisely
where you need it in a database. Neither can the compiler accept partial
areas of record definitions and create dummy levels where required... I
added these facilities because I thought they might be useful. Looks like
they are...

I can't speak for Robert, but feel my time has been well spent on this.

I have streamlined the download of the executable and it is now much quicker
and easier. (I'm learning... :-))

If you use the COBDATA tool, please uninstall it threough Add/Remove
programs, and re-download the latest version of the executable (version
2.0.0.8), which matches the source.

Cheers,

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."

Pete,

I am getting "the page cannot found" from:
http://primacomputing.co.nz/cobol21/downloads/newcobdata/SRC/SRC.zip

I did log on and I did view the licence.

OK.

I tested it last night and it worked. On investigation I see there was a
security problem, which would allow me access but not others. Sorry for the
inconvenence, Charlie, and thanks a lot for letting me know.

You cannot access directly using a link as above, and you must access via
the cobol21 site.

Normal steps would be:

1 access cobol21 home page.
2. click link to COBDATA
3. follow link to page 2 of COBDATA. Click on view licence.
4. Click on "OK, noted" and you will be returned to the 2nd page of COBDATA
where more buttons have appeared to allow downloads.
5 Click on "Download source only". If you have already logged in you should
be offered the download directly, if you haven't, you will be taken to the
credentials page, then to the download. The button for "download source and
executable" is currently not working. I'll be attending to it today. It
should give a message SAYING that it isn't available, but it may have just
failed the security, as you experienced.

Please ensure your browser cache has been refreshed (delete temporary
files).

Thanks again for the heads up... I can't fix things if I don't know they're
broken :-)

Cheers,

Pete.









This kind of thing is really annoying... I'm sorry for the inconvenience,
Charlie.

I think it may be because your Browser has cached the previous version of
the page, or maybe you

--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."

Ok I will try again later in the week. I did get that link via the cobol21
site and not directly.