Current Restrictions

This version of Data File Editor should only be used with the version of Visual COBOL or Enterprise Developer that it was installed with. The executable is not compatible with previous versions of either of these development products.

Editing files is not supported if your environment contains any form of filename manipulation; for example, the DATAFILE and FILESUFFIX options within an extfh.cfg file, or the setting of the COBDATA environment variable. To work around this restriction, open Data File Editor from the Windows menu, ensuring no such filename manipulation variables are set at a system level.

The only supported UNIX platforms are SUSE, Red Hat, Solaris SPARC, and AIX.

There is no support for Unicode files.

There is no file conversion functionality; use the DFCONV command line utility if you require this functionality.

Earlier releases of this product used structure files with a .dfs extension. These files were a different structure to the conventional structure (.str) files. In this release and beyond, we have reverted back to the conventional .str files. If you use .dfs structure files, you must recreate those structure files.

There is no support for the following types of data file:

ACUCOBOL-GT (Vision)
IMS
RM/COBOL

National data items are not supported in record or segment layouts.

You are unable to edit data that is marked within a structure file as floating point (COMP-2) data; this is to ensure that the internal representation of the floating point item is not corrupted.

The editor is unable to display the Euro character (€) correctly. If you open a file that contains the character, it will be preserved after the file is closed as long as you do not edit it directly.

Line sequential files cannot contain binary characters. The INSERTNULL configuration option, which is ON by default, is ignored.

Line sequential file and relative files both use 0D0A as a record terminator on Windows, and 0A as a record terminator on UNIX. The LSRECDELIM and RELRECDELIM configuration options are ignored.

You cannot insert or append records for sequential ESDS files.

Note: The normal file system only allows you to append records to the end of this type of file.

You cannot delete or resize records for ESDS files.

Note: The normal file system does not allow you to delete or resize records for this type of file either.

When using compressed files through Fileshare, user-defined compression routine executables must reside on both the client and the server machine (and be on the PATH) in order to effectively edit the data file.

When editing records, Insert mode does not work when using a layout to edit numeric fields; you can only edit numerics in Overwrite mode.

A limitation of the Windows clipboard means that when cutting or copying text from the editor, if the selection contains 0x00, any text after this character is truncated when pasted from the clipboard.

If you are setting MFCODESET, in order to use a particular character set, you must invoke the Data File Editor from the command line (in the environment in which MFCODESET is set); you cannot invoke it from the IDE if setting MFCODESET is required.

You cannot copy and paste the same record(s) in an indexed file type as that will create record(s) with a duplicated primary key.

When using the Find/Replace functionality with DBCS characters, you must enter the hexadecimal characters directly into the Hex pane. In order to do that, you must first enter some ANSI/EBCDIC text into the Find or Replace with fields, and then edit the resulting hexadecimal values, as appropriate.