Procedural Statements

COBOL-IT Report Writer will not act until your program executes a procedural statement. Three main commands or "verbs", INITIATE, GENERATE, and TERMINATE, are sufficient to produce most of the output from your Report Descriptions. INITIATE and TERMINATE are performed at the beginning and the end, respectively, of the processing for your report; while GENERATE is executed repeatedly, producing one DETAIL (except in summary reporting), preceded by any of the other TYPEs of group that may be needed as page breaks and/or control breaks are encountered.

As with the two preceding parts, users migrating from OS/VS or DOS/VS COBOL may refer to the Compatibility paragraph following each section.