Installing Visual COBOL into other instances of Eclipse

Visual COBOL ships with Eclipse 4.6 (64-bit).

After installing Visual COBOL, you can then also install it in other instances of Eclipse available on the same machine. The supported version of Eclipse are 4.6 for 64-bit Eclipse and 4.4.1, 4.4.2, 4.5, and 4.6 for 32-bit Eclipse.

Note: If you are installing Visual COBOL into Eclipse 4.5, or 4.6, you must install the Eclipse Target Management plugins into the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers package (32-bit):
  1. Click Help > Install New Software in Eclipse and add a new repository for the location http://download.eclipse.org/tm/updates/4.0.
  2. Expand RSE 3.8 Main Features, check RSE Terminals UI (Deprecated) and complete the installation of the plugin.

To assist you with automatically installing the Micro Focus plug-ins into other instances of Eclipse, Visual COBOL provides an installation utility, installeclipseplugins.bat available in the %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Micro Focus\Visual COBOL\installer folder.

To install Visual COBOL into another instance of Eclipse:

  1. Start a Visual COBOL command prompt.
  2. At the command prompt, navigate to the location of the install utility: %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Micro Focus\Visual COBOL\installer.
  3. Run the install utility from the command prompt using the following syntax: 
    installeclipseplugins -eclipse <EclipseInstallDir> -version <version> [-cobdir <InstallDir>] [-nosplash]

    Where:

    • EclipseInstallDir - full path to the installation directory of the instance of Eclipse you are installing into.
    • version - version number of the instance of Eclipse that you are installing into. The valid version numbers are 4.4.1, 4.4.2, 4.5, and 4.6 for 32-bit Eclipse and 4.6 for 64-bit Eclipse.
    • InstallDir - optional. The full path to the installation directory of Visual COBOL. If this is not specified, the COBDIR environment variable is used.
    • -nosplash - optional. If set, the installation does not replace the existing splash screen. A non-default Eclipse splash screen is not replaced, regardless of this setting.
    Note: To install into a 32-bit version of Eclipse, ensure that your PATH is set to a 32-bit version of Java. The default COBDIR location on Windows is C:\Program Files (x86)\Micro Focus\Enterprise Developer\bin. Alternatively, you can specify COBDIR from the command line.

    Running the utility installs the Visual COBOL plug-ins into the specified version of Eclipse and copies the Visual COBOL UpdateSite folders into EclipseInstallDir\eclipse\dropins.

    For example, to install Visual COBOL into an instance of Eclipse 4.5 available in the c:\eclipse folder, run the install utility with the following parameters: 
    installeclipseplugins -eclipse c:\eclipse -version 4.5 -nosplash