File Handling

Using Btrieve, a START operation cannot be performed with a part-key. The whole key must be used.
In Visual COBOL, if you attempt to open a data file located on a Novell Netware drive you may receive a file status 9/181 message, which indicates that you have used an invalid parameter.
The defaults for new indexed files are IDXFORMAT(8) and FILEMAXSIZE = 8, which enables support for 64-bit file handling. Novell Netware drives only behave like 32-bit drives and can only handle files up to 4GB in size.

To access files from a Novell Netware drive in Visual COBOL, you need to override these file handling formats by setting the following options in the file handler configuration file (EXTFH.CFG):
```
[XFH-DEFAULT]
IDXFORMAT=4
FILEMAXSIZE=4
```
If you are accessing Vision files through the Vision file handler (as opposed to the default Micro Focus File Handler) and you are upgrading from Visual COBOL version 2.0 to version 2.1, you must first uninstall version 2.0, otherwise the Vision file handler may not function correctly.
An improvement to allow greater scope in the naming of external files (files using the EXTERNAL keyword in the file description) has resulted in a possible issue if the applications sharing a file were compiled using different versions of Visual COBOL: if any applications compiled prior to Visual COBOL 2.2 share files with applications compiled with this version, you must recompile your older applications.