Micro Focus-related Maven goals

When you create a Maven-based project, the pom.xml is added as a project artifact. It is populated with a number of mandatory details, including some Micro Focus-related goals.

cobolDependencies

This goal is bound to the validation phase.

This goal acts like a dependency: it serves as a link from your application to the required COBOL JVM run-time system and libraries. This setting uses the COBDIR environment setting to locate these files. If COBDIR is not set, you can use the cobdir configuration tag in the POM to point to the product installation directory.

Important: This does mean that you can only build Maven artifacts containing COBOL JVM and COBOL JVM unit tests on a machine that has the Visual COBOL product installed.

cobolCompile

This goal is bound to the compile phase.

This goal links to the COBOL compiler, and also takes some additional (non-mandatory) configurations that are not passed to the compiler through conventional methods. The additional configurations, again set within the configuration tags, are:

• threadCount, which you can use to specify the number of threads for a parallel run. This defaults to 1, and is only applicable to projects built with dynamic calls enabled (ILDYNCALL).
• sourceTab, which you can use to specify the tab size. This defaults to 4.
• copypaths, which you can use to specify the location of your COBOL copy files. This setting is in addition to the COBCPY environment setting; you can set your copypath using either method.

cobolTestCompile

This goal is bound to the test-compile phase.

This goal links to the COBOL compiler, and also uses the same configurations as the cobolCompile goal.

cobolTest

This goal is bound to the test phase.

This goal links to the required run-time system and libraries when running the tests. It has no associated configurations.

Tip: If you need to use any environment variables in your tests, you can code an environmentVariables section (within the configuration section of the microfocus-maven-plugin plugin), and within it add a tag for each variable; for example:

<configuration>
  <environmentVariables>
     <env_1>hello</env_1>
     <env_2>goodbye</env_2>
  </environmentVariables>
</configuration>

The variables are only applicable when the cobolTest goal is specified.