FairCom RTG COBOL Edition User's Guide

Converting COBOL Vision Data to FairCom RTG COBOL Edition

This walkthrough describes how to convert existing COBOL data created with the ACUCOBOL Vision file system to FairCom RTG COBOL Edition data.

If your COBOL program performs OPEN OUTPUT operations, set the file system to CTREE (see Runtime Configuration) before running your program to create files in c-tree format.

If you cannot create files with your COBOL application, ctutil can use your XFD files to create a new empty file having the same structure described by the XFD files.

The following steps are used to convert ACUCOBOL Vision files into c-tree files. If you have already created the c-tree files you can jump directly to step 2:

1. To create an empty file using FairCom RTG COBOL Edition, execute ctutil -make passing the new file name and the XFD file containing its definition:

   ctutil -make myctdata mydata.xfd

   This command will create a file named myctdata using the image string obtained from the mydata.xfd.

2. Dump the existing data from the existing mydata data file created using Vision by using the vutil32 -unload functionality:

   vutil32 -unload mydata mydata.dmp

   This command will dump the entire contents of the mydata file to a plain text file called mydata.dmp

3. Load the dumped data into the file created in step 1 using the ctutil -load functionality:

   ctutil -load myctdata mydata.dmp A

   This command loads the data from the plain text file called mydata.dmp and writes it to the mydata FairCom RTG COBOL Edition data file.

4. Now the new FairCom RTG COBOL Edition data file mydata can be read through the FairCom RTG COBOL Edition SQL engine by running the following command:

   ctutil -sqlize myctdata mydata.xfd ADMIN ctreeSQL

   This command parses the mydata.xfd file and generates an XDD schema definition on the fly to be used by the FairCom RTG COBOL Edition engine to import the data file as part of a SQL database.

Direct Conversion

There is example code in drivers/ctree.cobol/samples/acucobol/visionconvert for a direct conversion utility. This can be compiled under any AcuCOBOL environment. It will extra data from a native Vision format table and write into an RTG table.