Recent content by doktord

I'm using Micro Focus Net Express 5.0 in conjunction with Visual Studio 2005.

Thanks for the replies, I appreciate it. I'll definitely take a good hard look at the info in the last post. I'll also try to compile the code again to tell you what the errors were, webrabbit. I was gone all weekend so I was a little slow to reply to the posts.

I tried to define it as RECORD SEQUENTIAL but it threw back errors. Should I be able to read/treat the indexed file as sequential?

Well Glenn, I finally got my hands on the MicroFocus compiler, so at the moment I'm going through a book I found on COBOL language and I'm just trying to get a feel for the basic layout of the code. Slowly but surely I'm beginning to get used to it.

Code itself would be ideal, so that way I could modify it to work with all the files I need to access. It's a slow process working with the programmers to find out which files contain the pieces of information I need to work with. At the moment I'm looking at at least 5 separate files, and...

sirragu, I greatly appreciate you being willing to do that for me, but that wouldn't solve my problem.. I actually need to be able to do it multiple times when the program runs.. So I would need an executable file or the code itself to be able to read it over and over again.

TonHu, the COBOL sowftware that creates the .DAT files will always be continuously running. This small program I am writing will only have to be run once a week.

About the indexes, I'm pretty sure I know what the definitions are, but if I need to use the same compiler, I might just forgo the indexing. Its not that crucial that I use it. As far as compilers are concerned, any suggestions as to which one to use? I looked into OpenCOBOL and Tiny Cobol...

Thanks guys. I'll try writing some quick 'n' dirty COBOL code to see if I can't convert them to .CSV or some other delimited file. I believe the key would be the item numbers, so I'll see if I can't get the indexing to work.

Also, I've just been informed that the compiler used to create the COBOL software was MF visual Cobol 3.6.

Thank you all for the input.. It makes a lot of sense now that I've been reading up on COBOL code and language. Would you all agree that the .DAT/.KEY files are somehow linked indexed files? I can't seem to find anything ANYWHERE about the .KEY extension. In some cases, the .KEY file is larger...

That was beyond helpful. Thank you so much for making more sense of that. I'll haveta take a deeper look into COBOL programming to see which route I would be more capable of. A DLL would be absolutely amazing and save me quite a bit of time. Although, I do understand that if there isn't a...

This is the reply I got from the software people regarding the files I am most interested in using. We're working on a non-compete agreement that will give me more access to the code itself: "Those two dat files are correct. Also look at the ITEMSTF.dat (item store file). This may provide...

I'm working on getting the COBOL source code as we speak, so hopefully I will have it in a couple days at the latest.

Thanks for the replies, guys. I'm going to be running it on XP and the server that holds the files is shown on the computer as another disk drive (S:). If push comes to shove (although I'd like to not do it this way) I could probably stumble my way through making a COBOL program to convert to a...