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Status Future consideration
Workspace COBOL Compilers
Categories z/OS
Created by Guest
Created on Apr 21, 2023

RELATED IDEAS

Provide a FUNCTION MAX-LENGTH for the maximum length of self-referencing ODO structures

If a linkage section structure contains one or more ODO items resident in the structure itself, Enterprise COBOL provides no means of determining the maximum length of such a structure for allocation purposes, short of a numeric literal copied from the length of the structure shown in the MAP output. This tends to break when the structure is revised and the literal fails to get updated.

A FUNCTION MAX-LENGTH() would return the maximum length of the structure as seen in the MAP output for ODO cases as well as well as non-ODO cases.

Note that FUNCTION LENGTH-OF (or LENGTH OF) returns the current length of the structure calculated using the values of the ODO items, a process that's undefined if the structure has yet to be allocated.

Idea priority High
  • Admin
    Basil Kanneth
    Reply
    |     Sep 25, 2023

    Hi Mike, yes, you can use Allocate with CICS.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Sep 21, 2023

    Basil, that works in batch, do you know if the COBOL Allocate verb is acceptable in CICS? I do not see it listed as restricted, but I always assumed we should use EXEC CICS GETMAIN?

  • Admin
    Basil Kanneth
    Reply
    |     Sep 21, 2023

    Hi Renaud,

    This idea has yet to be put into plan. We don't have an exact date yet.

    However, in the meantime, we would like to propose a possible workaround:

    If the only use case is for allocation, then using the form of ALLOCATE that allows you to specify the linkage section item directly in the ALLOCATE statement (i.e., no need to specify the max length), should already handle this correctly.

    Example:

    01 g2.

    03 blah pic 9(9) binary.

    03 tab occurs 0 to 10 times depending on blah.

    05 d1 pic x(10).

    05 d2 pic 9(9).

    :

    allocate g2

    The above example will allocate 194 bytes here (4 + 10*19).

    Please consider using the above workaround until the original Idea is put into plan. Thanks.


  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Sep 12, 2023

    Could you tell us when this new feature will be effective?

  • Admin
    Basil Kanneth
    Reply
    |     May 11, 2023

    This is a valid idea and has been accepted. It will be updated once put into plan.

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