New Features in Visual COBOL 8.0

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The Micro Focus COBOL extension for Visual Studio Code provides the following enhancements:

• The use of the Micro Focus COBOL extension with Visual COBOL 8.0 installed on the same machine enables COBOL Language Server support. This offers a rich COBOL editor experience inside Visual Studio Code including IntelliSense, Peek Definition, and Rename.

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This release provides the following enhancement:

• In all supported environments, you can use the .NET 6 SDK or Visual Studio code to build .NET 6 COBOL projects.

  Support for .NET Core 3.1 has been discontinued.

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This release offers the following improvements:

• A new "Select Element List" button in the action bar of the Table Results view enables you to directly select an existing list. Navigation in the history using the backward and forward arrows is now per Eclipse session.
• A new relationship for an action, Create Element List.
• A new JES function package - enables you to define tools in an AWM model to browse, cancel, or delete z/OS jobs.
• The IDz Function Package Tools now support the new tool interface introduced with release 5.0.
• A new Filter Data Tool in the AWM function package.

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The Application Analysis Server enables you to access either Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer or COBOL Analyzer from the IDE. This release includes the following enhancements to this feature:

• A generate code search report and a single code search reports are available.
• An improved Get Direct References report.

Enhancements to the Analysis Services include:

• An enhanced Program Flow Graph
• Support for displaying the Data Flow analysis as a Graph.
• A new Eclipse preference page, Application Wide Knowledge in Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > COBOL > Code Analysis. This enables you to adjust certain timeout settings for certain long-running queries executed against a remote Enterprise Analyzer or COBOL Analyzer server.

Enhancements in the Rule-Based analysis include:

• The Rules preference page in Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > COBOL > Code Analysis now supports nested rules.

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This release includes the following enhancement:

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Enhancements are available in the following areas:

Product:

• This release supports Eclipse 4.20 (2021-06), which is shipped and installed with Visual COBOL. Versions of Eclipse prior to this one are not supported.

Projects:

• Apache Maven support - native COBOL and native COBOL Unit Testing projects can be incorporated into your Maven-based lifecycles. They now accept a pom.xml file, which can be configured to run the Maven AntRun plugin, which allows Ant-based projects to work with Maven.
• Automatic directives determination - it is now possible to specify if this should run and if you will be prompted to perform it from Perform automatic directives determination preference, available from Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > COBOL > Directives Determination.
• Code Clean Up - you can configure code clean up preferences, which you can apply to your code to ensure consistency throughout your COBOL code (for example consistent use of the PIC or PICTURE keyword). These preferences are stored in profiles, which allows them to be shared among development teams.
• Multi-file compilation - right-click a selection of files, and click Compile when Automatic Build is disabled. This utilizes the Maximum compilations/links to execute concurrently option (available from Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > Builder > Project) for native COBOL projects.
• Order of the Copybook Paths list - it is now possible to control the initial position of the new directory in the list. Use the Insert to the beginning of copybook paths list or Append to the end of copybook paths list options to determine the position. These options are available from Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > Builder > Project.

COBOL Editor:

• COBOL code mining - code minings are additional content shown in the COBOL editor to give extra context to certain code elements. Use the Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > COBOL > Editor > Code Minings page to enable an indicator showing the number of times that a section or a paragraph is called in your native or procedural JVM COBOL code. Select the link shown to show a list of references in the Search view, where you can use the matches shown to jump to the actual call within your code.
• end- delimiter tooltips - within the COBOL editor, if you hover over the end- delimiter of a statement such as an IF or an EVALUATE statement, a tooltip showing the opening clause of the statement is displayed. You can enable/disable this behavior from the Block matching section in the COBOL editor preferences.

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This release provides enhancements in the following areas:

• EZ Sockets now supports up to 4096 sockets on Linux, up from 1024, and enhanced tracing.
  • EZ Sockets applications, including ones that use the CICS listener CSKL (EZACIC02), can have more simultaneous connections.
  • EZ Sockets tracing now has options for logging the recent history only when any error or one of a set of particular errors occurs. This makes it easier to use tracing to diagnose EZ Sockets issues.
• Enterprise Server dataset management - dataset maximum retention period with the ability to alter and create reports:
  • ES_JES_ENFORCE_EXPIRE_DATE - helps determine whether or not to check the expiration date when deleting a catalogued dataset, and if expired, delete the dataset. If it hasn't expired and the PURGE option has not been specified, the dataset is not removed. The PURGE keyword is required to delete non-expired datasets. PURGE removes the underlying physical dataset file unless it is referenced by another catalog entry. SMS MANAGEMENTCLASS now supports maximum RETAIN days. See Using SMS MGMT Classes and the %SMS example command in the same topic.
  • ES_JES_LISTCAT_YMD - helps determine the date format used in the HISTORY report generated when the IDCAMS LISTCAT command specifies the ALL option.
  • The EXPDT entry in a DD statement must be a four-digit year (YYYY); otherwise 1900 is the default, which is in-line with the mainframe processing, and prevents unexpired datasets from being erroneously removed (as was the case with the previous default of 2000). The ALTER command now takes the TO and FOR options to enable specification of the retention period for the entry being altered. The maximum retention period might be limited by the management class. The IDCAMS LISTCAT command ALL parameter now generates a separate HISTORY report that shows the creation date time and job, the last changed date time and Job, and the expiration date.
• HTTP compression - the Communications Server supports compressing large HTTP responses with gzip, and handles gzip-compressed HTTP requests. The Common Client supports gzip-compressed HTTP responses. Some large HTTP responses are compressed automatically if the client supports it. Large HTTP messages can be compressed, saving network bandwidth and improving performance.
• Task-cleanup performance - the performance of post-processing for tasks in MFCS has been improved.
• ICETOOL emulation - now supports the COUNT+n and COUNT-n syntax during trailer processing, where n is a numeric between 0-999. This adds to or subtracts from the COUNT value.
• Enterprise Server configuration - you can now change the recording directory of the dump, trace, HSF, and the console.log files of each region..
• Compression on ECI calls via CASBNCCL Client - when using the Micro Focus External Call Interface (ECI) over TCP/IP, the request and response data flows are now compressed using RLE.

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This release includes the following enhancements:

• Oracle Coherence is now available as a PAC Scale-Out repository as an alternative to Redis.
• Reduced number of Redis instances required when a PAC incompatible upgrade is performed - it is now possible to have multiple PSORs in one REDIS instance. This allows for the REDIS instances provisioned in the PAC to be reused.
• Enhanced PAC diagnostics via CTF - a new option on the ES Control page is now available to enable or disable CTF for a running region without the need to recycle the region.
• ESCWA API, version 2 - includes updated versions of some of the existing API, version 1 endpoints, with improved JSON property names, more sensible URIs. The version 2 API is a single API standard across API endpoints. It includes a number of usability enhancements, has a better readability and discoverability, and includes an improved API documentation.
• Enterprise Server Configuration Manager
  • A variety of configuration options are available in ESCWA on the General >Advanced page for a region.

    The property grid in ESCWA shows the full list of configurable properties, categorized by group, along with help text and some additional meta-information. Properties marked as dynamic in the property grid can also be updated in a running region.

  • A number of properties that were previously set with environment variables are now available in the ESCWA UI. The environment variables are still supported for backward compatibility.
• Accessibility enhancements - the ESCWA UI includes a number of improvements in the areas of usability with screenreaders, color contrast, and text and icon sizing and alignment. This is to give it an improved compliance with the 508 and WCAG 2.1 standards.

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This release includes the following enhancements:

• AWS Secrets Manager - support is available for using an AWS Secrets Manager, mfsecretsaws, as a remote vault.
• Protection for sensitive data - some sensitive data is now protected in the memory. This helps reduce the risk of exposing sensitive data such as passwords in core dumps and similar scenarios.
• An option to update short names - the ESF Update mechanism enables you to change between OS users ("long names") and ES userids ("short names") in running regions. This requires a non-default configuration setting.
• Caching improvements - ESF caching now caches more types of requests. This helps improve the Enterprise Server latency and throughput when external security is configured with caching.
• Support for Argon2 in password history - when Micro Focus passwords are used with the MLDAP ESM Module and password history is enabled, use Argon2 password verifiers in the history to avoid the potential exposure of passwords via weaker verifiers. This helps improve the security of the password-history mechanism.
• The product Help includes a new section, Securing Enterprise Server, which provides guidance on improving the security of Enterprise Server installations and the applications they host. This includes information on security and how to reduce security exposure.

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This release provides the following enhancement:

• The JES aliasing feature can be used with IMS DLI and BMP applications run from JCL.[2]
• APARM handling has been updated to use EBCDIC APARMs obtained from EBCDIC applications. In addition, the APARM positional parameter for DLI has been changed from 19 to 20 to be consistent with the IBM IMS documentation. The APARM positional parameter for BMP applications remains at 19. [13]
• The ES_IMS_APARM_DLI environment variable has been added to enable the APARM handing behavior of previous releases. See ES_IMS_APARM_DLI for details. [13]

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This release includes the following enhancement:

• Support has been added to Visual COBOL for Eclipse on Windows and UNIX for creating JSON (RESTful) Web Services using API resources.

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This release includes the following enhancement:

• The new SQL Error Mapping feature enables you to customize how error information is returned in SQLCODE, SQLSTATE, SQLERR and MFSQLMESSAGETEXT.