Useful Utility or Not?

From: Kyle (mr.kyle.t_at_netzero.com)
Date: 10/14/04 

Date: 14 Oct 2004 09:14:13 -0700

I've been out of CoBOL professionally since Y2K relegated me and my
Wang programming job to relational database and SQL coding. But the
new releases of CoBOL for networking platforms caused me to resurrect
a personal project. I call it "Tables by Design" and I'm wondering if
it has any commercial potential. It can provide greater flexibility
during application design resulting in less maintenance programming
after installation. Or so I believe.

By tables, I'm referring to those CoBOL "Search"able structures of
data which use "occurs" and "indexed by" in their definition, are for
the most part static in content and whose main function is the support
and definition of data within dynamic or primary files. As a
programmer, I've spent significant hours coding in support of these
data structures. With this utility, that task has been eliminated.

Using the utility, I can create up to 999 table layouts of up to 999
entries in each table. In the typical "data dictionary" way, up to 24
fields or 150 characters per table entry, can be defined within each
table. Generic programs are used to enter data, display and report
table entries. Working-Storage and Procedure Division load paragraphs
are created and a single Select, FD and Open statement are all that is
needed to load as many tables as a program may need to use.
Documentation about fields is a by-product of the table definition
process and is available, even at the end-user level, when making data
entries.

A unique feature, perhaps, is the ability to use table '921' in table
'922' to establish relationships between and/or validation of the data
being entered to individual fields. Some of the tables in the
application I wrote using the utility, are used exclusively to
validate data in other tables.

The utility is currently a Window's application written with Fujitsu's
PowerCOBOL 7.0 using the CoBOL85 scripting language option. The file
structures are traditional flat, ISAM files though I believe the
concept could work with a database structure as well.

I hope some of you will let me know what you think and if there is a
comparable utility already on the market. If you wish to correspond
privately, my e-mail is mr.kyle.t@netzero.com. Thanks for reading.

Kyle

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