Installing Visual COBOL into other instances of Eclipse

Visual COBOL ships with Eclipse 4.7 (64-bit).

After installing Visual COBOL, you can then also install it in other instances of Eclipse available on the same machine. The supported version of Eclipse are 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8 (requires Visual COBOL 4.0 Patch Update 4 or later) for both 32-bit and 64-bit Eclipse.

To assist you with automatically installing the Micro Focus plug-ins into other instances of Eclipse, Visual COBOL provides an installation utility, installeclipseplugins.bat available in the %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Micro Focus\Visual COBOL\installer folder.

To install Visual COBOL into another instance of Eclipse:

1. Start a Visual COBOL command prompt.
2. At the command prompt, navigate to the location of the install utility: %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Micro Focus\Visual COBOL\installer.
3. Run the install utility from the command prompt using the following syntax:

   installeclipseplugins -eclipse <EclipsePath> -version <version> [-cobdir <CobdirPath>] [-nosplash] [-installsubclipse]

   where:

   EclipsePath

   Full path to the installation directory of the instance of Eclipse you are installing into.

   version

   Version number of the instance of Eclipse that you are installing into. The valid version numbers are 4.6, and 4.7 for both 32-bit and 64-bit Eclipse.

   CobdirPath

   Optional - the full path to the installation directory of Visual COBOL. If this is not specified, the COBDIR environment variable is used.

   -nosplash

   Optional - if set, the installation does not replace the existing splash screen. A non-default Eclipse splash screen is not replaced, regardless of this setting.

   -installsubclipse

   Optional - if set, Subclipse is installed to the specified Eclipse location.

   Note: To install into a 32-bit version of Eclipse, ensure that your PATH is set to a 32-bit version of Java. When installing into a 64-bit version of Eclipse, ensure that your PATH is set to a 64-bit version of Java. If you are installing into Eclipse Neon then you must use Java 1.8 for the installation to function correctly. The default COBDIR location on Windows is C:\Program Files (x86)\Micro Focus\Enterprise Developer. Alternatively, you can specify COBDIR from the command line.

   Running the utility installs the Visual COBOL plug-ins into the specified version of Eclipse.

   For example, to install Visual COBOL into an instance of Eclipse 4.6 available in the c:\eclipse folder, run the install utility with the following parameters:

   installeclipseplugins -eclipse c:\eclipse -version 4.6 -nosplash