This version of the
Rocket COBOL extension has some limitations in the areas listed below.
Note: For full edit, compile, and debug capabilities for COBOL
applications, install one of
Rocket Software's products that support a fully-fledged IDE -
either Visual COBOL or
Enterprise Developer for Eclipse or Visual Studio.
Compiling and debugging
- Background parse does not support the inclusion of native preprocessors (including COBSQL, HTMLPP, and PREXML).
- Compiling and debugging are
supported only if you have a licensed version of a
Rocket Visual COBOL or
Rocket Enterprise Developer product on the same machine. See
Installation for details.
- Compiling of
.NET COBOL and JVM COBOL code is supported if the Visual Studio project and/or solution, or the Eclipse project, respectively,
are available.
- Debugging of .NET Framework COBOL code is not supported. Debugging of
.NET COBOL code is supported.
- Debugging of JVM COBOL code on a remote machine is not supported.
- A problem matcher is not available for the
errformat(1) directive.
- Compiling and debugging are not supported if you use
Visual Studio Code as a Web extension in a browser.
- Reading the COBOL Compiler directives set inside Eclipse COBOL project files (.cobolProj) is not supported.
Editor functionality provided by the COBOL Language Server
- COBOL Language Server is
supported only if you have a licensed version of a
Rocket Visual COBOL or
Rocket Enterprise Developer product on the same machine. See
Installation for details.
- In native code, COBOL Language Server only parses COBOL files that have been opened. Any workspace-wide features such as the
symbol search only return results for files that have been opened.
- Background parse does not fully support JVM COBOL.
- A file in the workspace can only have one project association. If multiple projects reference the same file, it can only be
associated with the first project that is scanned.
- Rename Symbol only works for files that have been opened and parsed.
- Rename Symbol and
Find All References do not support symbols defined in copybooks that are referenced using COPY... REPLACING.
- .cblproj project files created with
Visual COBOL or
Enterprise Developer for Visual Studio:
- Not supported on Linux
- SDK-style projects are not supported. The Language Server features are not supported in projects that target .NET Core or
.NET versions 5 or newer.
- The preprocessors settings are not supported.
- There is no NuGet support. NuGet dependencies are not resolved.
COBOL notebooks
- COPY statements do not resolve copybooks in a workspace.
- The
Debug Cell or
Step into Cell commands might not work if the cell has not been run first. You can also manually select
Notebook: COBOL Notebook Kernel from the Task Picker (Ctrl+Shift+P) to enable debugging.
- Output is displayed in the debugger output window when debugging rather than in the notebook itself.