The COBOL program interface for administration purposes is very similar to the C/C++ program interface described in chapter "Program interface for administration - KDCADMI". This means that you will also find it useful to refer to the description of the program interface in chapter "Program interface for administration - KDCADMI" and to the descriptions dealing with the functional scope, the structure of user-defined administration programs, and central and automatic administration functions (chapters "Administering objects and setting parameters", "Changing the configuration dynamically", "Generating konfiguration statements from the KDCFILE", "Writing your own administration programs", "Central administration of several applications", "Automatic administration" and "Access rights and data access control") when writing your own administration programs in COBOL. This section lists the differences that you will need to be aware of when programming administration applications in COBOL:
The COBOL program interface differs from the C/C++ program interface in the following ways:
In place of a header file (kcadminc.h) which includes all the data structures, COBOL is supplied with individual COPY members. Each of these COPY members usually contains only a single data structure (see table in chapter "COPY members for the program interface in COBOL"). This gives you the option of including individual data structures in programs which, under certain circumstances, can make programming considerably easier (e.g. when creating input/output tables).
In accordance with COBOL conventions, field names use uppercase letters in place of lowercase letters and hyphens (-) in place of underscores (_).
Example: The COBOL field name OBJ-TYPE corresponds to the C data field obj_type.