Configuring Background Parsing in the PL/I Editor

The code you type is parsed continuously to identify errors. The errors are underlined with red squiggly lines.

Regardless of whether background parsing is enabled, error information is generated during project builds.

CAUTION:

You can turn off background parsing, but many of the IDE features depend on it (for example Outline/Program outline, colorization). If it is switched off they will not work and might cause unexpected problems.

Switching off or delaying background parsing when Eclipse is running

You can turn off background parsing in the Preferences dialog box, click Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > PL/I > Editor and uncheck Background parsing).

Parsing is triggered when there is a pause in editing code; by default this is 500 milliseconds. By keeping Background parsing selected and entering a larger value in the Trigger delay field, you can make sure your code is parsed less frequently, and improve performance when developing projects with large numbers of source files.

By default, the PL/I Compiler and preprocessors are used to generate the information displayed during background parsing. If you want to revert to the old behavior where the ANTLR grammar parser is used to generate background parsing information for PL/I, uncheck Background parse files with projects using the Open PL/I Compiler.

Switching off background parsing before you start Eclipse

Use the property disable.cobol.indexing to switch off background parsing when you start Eclipse.

If you start Eclipse from the command line, you do this by using the command:

eclipse.exe -vmargs -Ddisable.cobol.indexing=true

If you start Eclipse from the Start menu or a shortcut, edit the eclipse.ini file and add the line:

-Ddisable.cobol.indexing=true

to the -vmargs section.

Using Open PL/I compiler

You can choose to use Open PL/I compiler when background parsing files within projects. To do this, click Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > PL/I > Editor, and then click Background parse files within projects using the Open PL/I compiler. Parsing using the Open PL/I compiler will check for semantic and syntactical errors.

Note: The Open PL/I compiler supports a different subset of the PL/I language. This might result in errors or warning messages for syntax that might have been accepted by the default parser. The outline view displays different information for data item declarations, giving type and size instead of all attributes specified by the declaration.