Dictionary/3000 Reference Manual (32244-90001)

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7 The Dictionary DICTCDE Utility

Overview

DICTCDE, the COBOL Deﬁnition Extract Utility, is an interactive, prompt-driven utility

provided by Dictionary/3000. This utility extracts data and ﬁle deﬁnitions from the

Dictionary and generates the corresponding COBOL source code for the data deﬁnitions.

When a parent entity is extracted from the Dictionary, DICTCDE also generates the code

for any related child entities. The entities extracted from the Dictionary can be generated

by their primary names or by their aliases. (Refer to Changing the DICTCDE Options

discussed later in this section for more information on using the entities' aliases.) As the

source code is generated, it is echoed to the terminal and written to the COBOL copylib

that you specify.

When source code is generated for an entity, DICTCDE checks that the entity name and

data type as deﬁned in the Dictionary for that entity are compatible with COBOL. If the

data type for the entity is not COBOL compatible, DICTCDE will issue a warning message

and convert the data type to compatible COBOL code. (See COBOL Data Type Mappings

later in this section for more detailed information.) If the entity name as deﬁned in the

Dictionary is an illegal COBOL name (for instance, if the name begins with a hyphen) or

the entity name is a COBOL reserved word, DICTCDE will issue a warning message and

convert the name to a legal COBOL name. (See DICTCDE Naming Considerations later in

this section for more detailed information.)

DICTCDE also provides an interactive help facility which gives a brief description of the

DICTCDE prompts and a set of options which allows you to change the defaults used by

DICTCDE.

This section describes how to run DICTCDE and use its help facility, deﬁnes the options

that can be changed, and gives examples of the source code generated by DICTCDE.