Inside COBOL #54 (Fujitsu PowerCobol)
by
Shawn Gordon
President
The Kompany

We are going to go down a slightly different road this month and look at the MS Windows based product PowerCobol from Fujitsu Software. Some of you may recall that I reported last year that Fujitsu had been in serious talks with HP to become THE HP 3000 COBOL compiler. Talks were quit serious and extensive, however Fujitsu lacked the 3000 expertise, and HP was unable to lend it out, to make the project a reality.

This fact does not however negate the usefulness of the PowerCobol environment. With the recently released version 4 I decided to do some hard core proof of concept work. Since I already had the ODBC/32 driver from MiniSoft, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to see if I could drag the reset of I.S. into client/server without using Visual Basic, and dealing with that learning curve.

Take a look at figure 1. This is an example of the forms designer, here is where you can place your fields and buttons and such. The funky circle in the upper left corner is a data access control. This is where it get’s to be pretty fun, we just select ODBC as the data source, and pick a configured database. I chose one of my HP 3000 based Image databases, and I was then given a pick list of data sets, from there you can pick the items, and put selection criteria on each item. Take a look at the ODBC/32 review for some of those screen snapshots.

Figure 2 shows the PowerCobol project manager, unlike VB or Delphi, you can’t just double click on a control to add code, you have to do it in the project manager. Whats interesting is that each control on the form, and the form itself, is essentially an entire COBOL program. You can code each of the divisions, declare variables as global or local, put in record structures, file I/O, whatever.

In my example program I want to let the screen either do a serial read on the database, or use the key value if it is entered. So the logic that is in the RETRIEVE button is shown in Figure 3. The name of our data access control i
s “CmDB1”, and each of the data items is a property of it. I have a global variable that I use to keep track of whether the database is open or not, this controls if we open the database when we go to read.

PowerCobol will allow you to code SQL statements directly if you want, but by using the methods of the data access control you get an environment that is easy to equate to Image. We have “OpenDB”, just like “DBOPEN”, the “SelectRecords” is like “DBFIND”, and “ReadNextRecord” is like “DBGET”.

There are a few things that I found to still be strange with PowerCobol, but I didn’t make an exhaustive review of it. First, the Combo Box control can only be loaded from a file, so if you wanted to dynamically get a list out of a database and load the control, you would first have to write it to a file. You can use a third party OCX control if you want that doesn’t require this to get around the problem if you want.

There also doesn’t appear to be a way to bind a field from a data access control to a field on the screen, so you are always stuck with “MOVE ‘ITEM’ OF BASE TO ‘TEXT’ OF FIELD”. The upside to this is that it is displayed on the screen at the same time, so there is only one command to set and display the information.

My final complaint has to do with the actual COBOL syntax. COBOL 85 supported the use of things like ‘<>, >=, <=' in IF statements, but PowerCobol forces you to say "NOT EQUAL" instead of "<>“.

I spoke extensively with Fujitsu during their first release of 16 bit PowerCobol 2 years ago, and told them then that they should just copy the Delphi interface, since that was what Visual Basic was starting to do. The software looks pretty much like a cross between Visual Basic 3, and Visual C++. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it still leaves them behind the more mature tools. In this fourth release of the product I would have hoped that they would try to leap frog the competition.

Even with all that said, Fujitsu can hardly keep any of the product in stock the demand is so high. The learning curve is pretty light, and using something like ODBC/32 from MiniSoft you are able to quickly and easily build client/server applications in a language you are familiar with. I am very excited by this combination and am currently planning on using it to replace all of the QUICK screens on a re-engineering project I am working on. If you want to find out more, or order a demo from Fujitsu, you can check out there web site at www.adtools.com

Figure 3


ENVIRONMENT     DIVISION.
DATA            DIVISION.

 WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.

 01 SELECT-STRING.
    03 SELECT-TEXT    PIC X(09) VALUE "STATE = ".
    03 SELECT-TEXT-2  PIC X(02) VALUE SPACES.

 PROCEDURE DIVISION.

     IF DB-STATE-FLAG Not EQUAL 1
        INVOKE CmDB1 "OpenDB" RETURNING RETURNVALUE
        MOVE 1                TO DB-STATE-FLAG
        INVOKE CmDB1 "SelectRecords" RETURNING RETURNVALUE
     END-IF
     IF "Text" of STATE Not Equal SELECT-TEXT-2
        MOVE "Text" OF STATE TO SELECT-TEXT-2
        MOVE SELECT-STRING TO "Condition" OF CmDB1
        INVOKE CmDB1 "SelectRecords" RETURNING RETURNVALUE
     END-IF
* read the next record and move its contents to the form
     INVOKE CmDB1 "ReadNextRecord" RETURNING RETURNVALUE
     MOVE "STATE" OF CmDB1 TO "Text" of STATE
     MOVE "STATE_NAME" OF CmDB1 TO "Text" OF NAME
     MOVE "STATE_FLAGS" OF CmDB1 TO "Text" OF FLAGS

     MOVE "STATE" OF CmDB1 TO SELECT-TEXT-2