Using external file descriptions in COBOL applications that use SQL

SQL uses the COPY DD-format-name, COPY DD-ALL-FORMATS, COPY DDS-format-name, COPY DDR-format-name, COPY DDR-ALL-FORMATS, COPY DDSR-format-name, COPY DDS-ALL-FORMATS, and COPY DDSR-ALL-FORMATS to retrieve host variables from the file definitions.

If the REPLACING option is specified, only complete name replacing is done. Var-1 is compared against the format name and the field name. If they are equal, var-2 is used as the new name.

Note: You cannot retrieve host variables from file definitions that have field names which are COBOL reserved words. You must place the COPY DDx-format statement within a COBOL host structure.

To retrieve the definition of the sample table DEPARTMENT described in Db2® for i sample tables in the SQL programming concepts topic collection, you can code the following:

01   DEPARTMENT-STRUCTURE.
     COPY DDS-ALL-FORMATS OF DEPARTMENT.

A host structure named DEPARTMENT-STRUCTURE is defined with an 05 level field named DEPARTMENT-RECORD that contains four 06 level fields named DEPTNO, DEPTNAME, MGRNO, and ADMRDEPT. These field names can be used as host variables in SQL statements.

For more information about the COBOL COPY verb, see the ILE COBOL Language Reference Link to PDF and COBOL/400 User's Guide at IBM® Publications Center Link outside the information center .

CLOB, BLOB, and DBCLOB columns in the external file are ignored. No host variable definition will be generated in the host structure for these types.