FairCom RTG COBOL Edition User's Guide

Handling DATE Fields in Your XFD

Micro Focus and ACUCOBOL support DATE directives in the XFD. Using the DATE directive, a COBOL field can be mapped to the desired time and date format. This directive applies to a numeric XFD field. The syntax is as follows:

*>>XDD DATE=date-format-string

If the date-format-string is not supplied, 6-digit fields are interpreted as YYMMDD and 8-digit fields are interpreted as YYYYMMDD.

If a different date format is required, the date-format-string can be used to specify the format using these characters:

• M - Month (01–12)
• Y - Year (two or four digits)
• D - Day of month (01–31)
• J - Julian day (00000000–99999999)
• E - Day of year (001–366)
• H - Hour (00–23)
• N - Minute
• S - Second
• T - Hundredths of a second

All other characters are invalid and will cause an error.

Example 1

This example creates "date-hired" column with type DATE based on an 8-digit field with the default format of YYYYMMDD:

*>>XDD date

03 date-hired pic 9(8).

03 pay-scale pic x(3).

Example 2

This example shows a different way to produce a column named "date-hired" with type DATE based on an 8-digit field with a format of YYYYMMDD:

*>>XDD DATE

*>>XDD USE GROUP

03 date-hired.

05 yyyy pic 9(4).

05 mm pic 9(2).

05 dd pic 9(2).

Example 3

This example produces a column named "date-sold" with type DATE. The date is based on a 7-digit field that contains the day of the year (e.g., February 1st is 032), followed by the four-digit year (e.g., 2018).

*>>XDD DATE=EEEYYYY

03 date-sold pic 9(7).

03 sales-rep pic x(30).