ODBC driver/C lib for AcuCobol-85 Vision file system? 1

[MichaelSynnott]

Firstly, I am a complete newbie to AcuCobol and the Vision(?) file system and am flying blind, so please bear with me if any questions or points seem stupid.

I have inherited a system that needs replacing. I have no source code nor had I any idea what the system was written in. I hacked the executables and found out the thing is written in AcuCobol-85. I had never heard of AcuCobol-85 until two weeks ago. The last time I touched COBOL was on a VAX-11 back in '83!

By trawling the Net I have discovered that the file system is called 'Vision' (I think!).

Ok, here's the question: There appears to be an ODBC driver for AcuCobol-GT's file system but does this file system differ greatly from AcuCobol-85's?

If so is there an ODBC driver for AcuCobol-85?

All I need to be able to do is extract the data from the data files cleanly and comprehensively.

A C library to do this would be just as good, if not better.

vutil -version

returns the following:

ACUCOBOL-85 file utility version 2.3.1
Copyright (c) 1985 - 1994, ACUCOBOL, Inc.

Over to you guys

TIA,

Michael.

 

[3gm]

Michael -

I can provide some info, but perhaps not enough. Yes, AcuCOBOL uses a proprietary file system called Vision. There are a couple of Vision versions available. I believe the latest is Version 4; you probably have Version 3. I suspect the current shipping ODBC module (an extra cost item) is backwards compatible with all or most versions of Vision.

There is no C support available for the file system. As I said, it is proprietary.

Your best bet may be to use VUTIL to extract the data to flat files and process from there.

Glenn
Brainbench MVP for COBOL II

 

[MichaelSynnott]

Thanks Glenn,

After a little more hacking I discovered that it is indeed Vision v3 I'm dealing with.

I've already extracted large swatches of the data using vutil but (still flying blind!) a lot of it makes little or no sense. If I knew how to extract the file descriptors I'd probably be able to make more sense of it. The numeric fields seem to be coming out in BCD into the flat files and whilst I am well capable of hacking this stuff around to make it usable, I'm not sure I can be arsed when there is a perfectly good ODBC driver available.

Again, thanks for your help. Now that I know the ODBC driver will read Vision 3 files I don't mind shelling out for it.

All the best,

Michael.

 

[3gm]

Michael -

Note that "I suspect" it can read Version 3 Vision files. The last place I worked had played with the ODBC stuff, but I don't know what versions were involved etc. Before you shell out some big bucks, you should confirm that with AcuCorp.

The BCD stuff is probably PIC 9(x) USAGE COMP-6 which is a non-standard format. It might also be USAGE COMP-3 which is standard, packed-decimal (i.e. it includes a sign in the last nibble). The only way to know is to have the COBOL FD's available or the AcuCorp XFDs. OOPS, now that I think about it, I believe the ODBC driver requires the XFDs. If you don't already have them, you have to have the compiler and source code to generate them. (And if you have the source code, why not just read the VUTIL extracts directly?)

Stuff gets complicated fast, doesn't it?

Good luck.

Glenn