Release Overview
Version 6.0

Larger record size

Vision 5 supports record sizes up to 64 megabytes (67,108,864 bytes). The new limit applies to sequential, relative, and Vision 5 indexed files. The ACUCOBOL-GT compiler, runtime, and support utilities have been updated to work with these larger records. To use larger records, simply modify your file descriptors to specify records that are larger than the old 32K limit. Programs that use larger record sizes must be compiled and run with Version 6.0.

For binary sequential and relative files with variable-length records larger than 65,535 (0xFFFF) bytes, it is necessary to store two additional bytes in the record header. These bytes store the record length. These bytes are read and written automatically by programs that know the maximum record size of the file. However, if you try to read one of these files with "vutil -load", it is necessary to indicate that these extra header bytes exist. You do this with the new "-x" option. For example:

    vutil -load -vbx infile.seq outfile.vis   

loads "infile.seq" into "outfile.vis" as a binary sequential file with the new large variable length record headers.

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Caution: Because sequential and relative files are not "versioned" like Vision files, you must be careful not to use sequential or relative files that use the new larger record sizes with older versions of the file utilities. Utilities earlier than Version 6.0 don't know how to handle them.

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If you use I$IO, you may be interested to know that this enhancement resulted in changes to the definition of the MAX-REC-SIZE, MIN-REC-SIZE, and KEY-OFFSET data items in sample/def/filesys.def.

If you use C$REDIRECT you may be interested to know that this enhancement resulted in changes to the definition of the HANDLER-MAX-LREC-SIZE, HANDLER-MIN-LREC-SIZE, and HANDLER-SEGMENT-OFFSET data items in sample/def/handler.cpy.

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