COBOL THE CHALLENGE BEFORE YOU BEGIN

COBOL may be an old language, but it still runs the world!

COBOL’s Bright Future We’ll crack open a COBOL program that takes a JSON file as
input and prints a grocery store flyer. You’ll learn the basics of
Nothing besides the
fundamentals (VS Code, data
Here for the long haul COBOL in the process of completing the challenges. Being able
to add COBOL to your own personal list of talents will definitely
sets, JCL) is required.

18 steps 4 hours get you attention.

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1. INSTALL IBM Z OPEN EDITOR 2. COLUMN SECTION MODE 3. SET TO STAY OPEN
By default, when you select lines of code, they will be Create your own COBOL source library – from your VSCode
This VSCode extension supplies COBOL language support,
highlighted in columns, which can be handy in some situations terminal , allocate a new dataset:
including syntax highlighting zowe files create pds --data-class spds 'Zxxxxxx.CBL'
but probably not in this challenge.
Note: for copy and paste, make sure formatting remains the same
If you don’t already have the IBM Z Open Editor installed, let’s
If you’d like to turn off this feature, in your top menu bar, go to Open the source dataset ‘ZXP.PUBLIC.SOURCE’ and copy the
get that done. JSONCBL and JSONJCL members into your own CBL and JCL
Selection->Column Selection Mode and uncheck.
datasets, respectively. No need to read through them yet.
Open VSCode and in the left side tool menu select Extensions.
There’s a default feature of VS Code that can be helpful
From there, in the "Search Extensions in Marketplace" search in this challenge to save you from having to close files
field, type “IBM Z Open Editor”. Search results will begin you only need to preview. To take our main files out of
populating, select "IBM Z Open Editor" and click install preview mode, double click the italicized tab name. Once
set, italics are removed.
COBOL Here for the long haul

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4. SET UP COLUMN RULERS 5. CHECK COBOL SYNTAX ERRORS 6. SAVE, COMPILE AND RUN
IBM Z Open Editor already sets up the vertical rulers you’ll Save using File->Save.
Open the COBOL source file by doing Select View->Problems in
need for COBOL source files.
the top menu.
Right click your JCL member JSONJCL and Submit Job.
JCL statements are up to 80 columns wide, but columns 73-80
A list of two COBOL syntax errors is displayed in the Problems
are ignored. Set up a column ruler after column 72 so you don’t The JCL script compiles and runs the COBOL program. A
type past there. tab at the bottom. Double click each problem and see if you can
resolve the errors. notification will appear that the job has been submitted. If it
disappears, click the bell icon to see recent notifications.
Open Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows) and type
“settings json” (Select “Preferences: Open Settings (JSON)”) Once they are resolved, the Problems tab should show 0 errors
and there should be no red underlines in your COBOL program. Click the job number to open the job results.
à Column rulers, add this at the end: "editor.rulers":[72]
Make sure to add a comma at the end of the line before.
WHY ARE WE LEARNING COBOL IN THIS DECADE?
Simple answer: COBOL is everywhere.

Have you or someone you know ever gone to a bank or withdrawn cash from an ATM? Most likely, you
are running a COBOL transaction. More than one million COBOL programs run every second of every
day on mainframes. In fact, most IBM Fortune 1000 customers run on COBOL.

COBOL is self-documenting, a natural string-processing language and does fixed-point arithmetic. It

was designed for business processing, so it is very efficient, adaptable and maintainable. To learn more
about COBOL and its relevancy please look at: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-
linuxone/blogs/dan-zhang1/2020/04/02/should-we-still-use-cobol
COBOL Here for the long haul

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7. CHECK THE RETURN CODE 8. OH NO, AN ABEND 9. FIXED AND READY TO GO

If the program shows “ACTIVE”, collapse and re-expand the ABEND stands for abnormal end and is a common error return Once you have fixed the ABEND, submit the JCL job (step 6).
job results (or press the “refresh” icon beside JOBS) until you code on z/OS.
see that the program ended (“ACTIVE” changes to a return You should see return code CC 0000 which means success.
code). Expand the results to see the list of output files. Examine the
output files to locate the one with the error message. You might have seen that this program should output a grocery
A return code of CC 0000 means success and anything else store flyer. You can examine the flyer in output file
means there’s an error. The error message refers to FLYYFILE. What’s wrong? Examine RUNPROG:FLYRFILE(105).
both the COBOL and JCL files.
If you successfully fixed the problems from step 5, you will still It shows just the products that are about to expire, put on a
get an ABEND error message, which is the next challenge in 50% discount. The flyer is in plain text for now, and we’ll fix
step 8. that in a bit.
COBOL Here for the long haul

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10. MISSING TITLE 11. PLAIN JANE WON’T DO 12. RUN THE CODE
Our grocery store name “Corner Grocery Store” is missing from We fixed the title, but we can’t show our customers the flyer in Open the job dataset - RUNPROG:FLYRFILE(105).
the plain text flyer. plain text like this!
If you see HTML tags starting with <html>, you did it! But how
This one is tricky! Could there be a parameter to pass to the program to add can we preview it to see the formatting?
formatting?
Spot and fix the error, then submit the JCL job again (from Step
8) to make sure the title is added. Once you think you’ve figured it out, submit the JCL job (again
from Step 8) and check the flyer once more.
COBOL Here for the long haul

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13. INSTALL HTML PREVIEW EXT. 14. SET LANGUAGE MODE 15. OPEN SESAME
Select Extensions in the VSCode left side tool menu. With your FLYRFILE open, in the bottom right, click “Plain At the top right, click the icon to “Open Preview to the Side”.
Text” then “Configure File Association for ‘.FLYRFILE’…”
Search HTML Preview and install one of the options, such as and enter HTML The flyer is better formatted now, but there’s still some
the one by Thomas Haakon Townsend problems.
Once done, you will see HTML syntax highlighting.
COBOL Here for the long haul

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16. ADD CURRENCY SYMBOLS 17. ADD PRODUCT IMAGES 18. EXPAND YOUR KNOWLEDGE
Want to learn more? Take IBM's free COBOL course.
The currency should be in US dollars ($), but the dollar sign is This is the final challenge. Once you figure it out, submit the
missing, what’s wrong? JCL job and open the flyer’s HTML preview to make sure it It includes hands-on labs in VS Code:
looks nice.
Once the issue is fixed, submit the JCL job (Step 8 again), open
• Video version: https://ibm.biz/learn-cobol-vscode
the flyer’s HTML preview again to check your work. To finish off, create a copy of the html produced in a • Text version: https://ibm.biz/github-cobol
cobol.html file in your USS home directory, then submit the
Didn’t our input JSON (in the JCL file) contain links to real CHKACBLH job from ‘ZXP.PUBLIC.JCL’
product images? Why aren’t they showing up? Did we forget to
map these images when declaring the JSON structure in
COBOL?

NICE JOB! LET’S RECAP NEXT UP…

COBOL is one of the most used languages on IBM Z today, and Nice work!
runs the world’s economy, but those knowledgeable in the
language are retiring. Your help is needed to fill that gap. You’ve been able to expand your
knowledge on COBOL using HTML.
You’ve demonstrated a solid understanding of some of the most Continue your learning experience
important aspects of COBOL and have some good examples to by choosing another Advanced
share with prospective employers. You will especially impress challenge.
them by demonstrating that you know about COBOL’s latest
support for JSON, which they might not even know about yet!