I'm currently working in an RM Cobol environment, and working my way into Visual COBOL.
I have a question concerning adjusting the file/record size of existing systems. For example if a record is 1024 Bytes, and more fields need to be added. I currently write a conversion program to convert the file to the new size (Basically creating a new file with the improved layout and moving the old record to the new file). Then I update all the systems that use the file to the new size and layout.
Which can be a pain if its very popular file layout. We don't use copybooks (boss has a horror story about helping a city with Cobol who had sources but all the copy books where missing).
I was just wondering how you could, with Visual Cobol, do the same thing? And how would you track down which programs need to be rebuilt, in a Visual Cobol world. Finding the programs in RM is as simple as doing a search in the Source Directory for all programs that use the name of the file. But since Visual COBOL uses projects ... is there a trick I'm not seeing?
Just decided to get thoughts as I'm about to increase the size of a very popular file(In RM), in many many programs.
Thanks for your input.
Eric Boatman