As soon as your installation and setup are complete, you may run the demonstration program (demo.cbl) included on your distribution medium. This program illustrates many of the Database Connectors product capabilities, including how to
The demo program simulates what might be used in a distributor’s shipping department. You'll be creating the orderfile table, which contains information about the orders placed by the distributor's customers. The orderfile table has the following columns of information (the database data type and COBOL data type are shown for each).
| Column Name | Data Type | COBOL PIC |
|---|---|---|
| ORDER_NUM | CHAR(4) | pic x(4) |
| ORDER_DATE | DATE | pic 9(6) |
| CUSTOMER_NUM | CHAR(3) | pic x(3) |
| SHIP_INSTRUCT | CHAR(40) | pic x(40) |
| BACKLOG | CHAR(1) | pic x |
| PO_NUM | CHAR(10) | pic x(10) |
| SHIP_DATE | DATE | pic 9(6) |
| SHIP_WEIGHT | NUMBER(8,2) | pic 9(6)v99 |
| SHIP_CHARGE | NUMBER(6,2) | pic 9(4)v99 |
| PAID_DATE | DATE | pic 9(6) |
Here is the COBOL file descriptor (FD) that matches the orderfile table. Note that the FD entries must match the names of the RDBMS fields and must match their data types:
fd orders.
01 order-record.
03 order-num pic x(4).
03 order-fields.
05 order-date pic 9(6).
05 customer-num pic x(3).
05 ship-instruct pic x(40).
05 backlog pic x.
05 po-num pic x(10).
05 ship-date pic 9(6).
05 ship-weight pic 9(6)v99.
05 ship-charge pic 9(4)v99.
05 paid-date pic 9(6).
First compile the demo program, demo.cbl, using standard compile commands with the CALLFH (ACUFH) directive. The demo.cbl program contains compiler directives at the top of the program to generate an eXtended File Descriptors (XFD) file called orderfile.xfd (for information about XFDs, see the chapter XFDs.) You may also specify these directives on your compile command line. The run time system uses this XFD to map RDBMS data types to COBOL data types.
Database Connectors create new tables in the target database when your COBOL application issues an OPEN OUTPUT command. If you turn on file tracing for a COBOL program that performs this operation on a target file, you can see the series of SQL statements generated by the run time system to create the database table, indexes, and access permissions. This can be useful should you wish to have a set of stand-alone SQL scripts to generate test databases or base set of tables for an end user install for your COBOL files to work with.