Advanced Debug Launch Configurations

Note:

This functionality requires a licensed version of a Micro Focus Visual COBOL or Enterprise Developer product on the same machine. See Installation for details.
The following information applies to native COBOL code.

You can create additional launch configurations for other debugging scenarios in the launch.json file:

With launch.json opened in Visual Studio Code, click Run > Add Configuration.
You can add one of the following configurations - COBOL (native): Launch, COBOL (native): Launch - remote, COBOL (native): Launch - Remote-SSH, COBOL (native): Launch - 64-bit, COBOL (native): Attach to process, COBOL (native): Enterprise Server, COBOL (native): Wait for attachment.

Optionally, you can add more settings to these as required.

Some of the settings you can specify are:

"args": [] - command line arguments for the program.
"cwd": "${workspaceFolder}" - current working directory. This is set to the workspace folder, by default.
"env": [ {"name": "", "value": "" }] - specify any environment variables as required.
"is64bit": true - if you want to debug a 64-bit application. This is set to true by default on Linux.
"program": "${workspaceFolder}/<insert-program-name-here>" - specify an executable or a core dump file.
"remoteDebug" - specify any remote debug settings. You need to have Visual COBOL or Enterprise Developer and cobdebugremote running on the remote machine:
```
            "remoteDebug": {
                "machine": "machine name or IP",
                "port": nn
            }
```
When Remote debugging, file names provided by the debugger contain paths on the remote file system which may not exist on the local file system. You can add one or more pathMappings which maps paths from the remote file system to paths on the local file system to enable the source files to be opened:
```
            "pathMappings": [
              {
                    "remote": "remote-path",
                    "local": "local-path"}
            ],
```
"symbolSearchPaths": [] - specify the location of the .idy files.
"stopOnEntry": true - the debugger stops on the first line of debuggable code.

Example - enable CTF tracing

In order to enable CTF tracing for the COBOL program being run, you need to add the following setting:

"env": [ {"name": "MFTRACE_CONFIG", "value": "d:\\trace.cfg" }]

This does not, on its own, result in CTF output in the DEBUG CONSOLE.

If, however, the CTF configuration file has the idedbg emitter set then CTF output will be displayed in the DEBUG CONSOLE. The idedbg emitter is only available on Windows and therefore the output will only be displayed in the DEBUG CONSOLE on Windows.

As an alternative, on Linux platforms the content of the textfile emitter can be viewed in Visual Studio Code as it is written by opening the Terminal and running the tail command using:

 tail -f <path-to-emitter-file>

For more about CTF Tracing, see the product Help of Micro Focus Visual COBOL or Enterprise Developer.