Micro Focus Studio Enterprise Edition for Windows > General Reference > COBOL Language Reference > Part 2. Program Definition > Data Division > File and Data Description > File Description Entry Skeleton > The VALUE OF Clause

The VALUE OF Clause

The VALUE OF clause specifies the description of an item in the label records associated with a file.

The VALUE OF clause of the file description entry is classed as an obsolete element in the ANSI'85 standard and is scheduled to be deleted from the next full revision of the ANSI Standard.

All dialects in this COBOL implementation fully support this syntax. The FLAGSTD Compiler directive can be used to detect all occurrences of this syntax.

Although it is a part of the standard COBOL definition, this feature is explicitly excluded from the X/Open COBOL language definitions and should not be used in a conforming X/Open COBOL source program.

General Formats for Format 1 (All Files)

General Formats for Format 2 (All Files)

Syntax Rules for Format 1 (All Files)

Data-name-1 should be qualified when necessary but cannot be subscripted or indexed, nor can it be an item described with the USAGE IS INDEX clause.

Syntax Rules for Format 2 (All Files)

Data-name-2 must be in the Working-Storage Section.
Literal-2 must be a nonnumeric literal and cannot be a figurative constant.
The VALUE OF FILE-ID clause cannot be used if external-file-reference, data-name-1 or literal-1 has been specified in the ASSIGN clause in the file control entry (see the topic The File Control Entry in the chapter Environment Division).

General Rules for Format 1 (All Files)

This clause is documentary only.

General Rules for Format 2 (All Files)

The character-string specified in literal-2 or data-name-2 is taken as the external file-name.