Defining a Program › Programming Capabilities

Programming Capabilities

The Creating Programs Guide introduces you to the CA Ideal program definition facility, integrating all aspects of creating a program in CA Ideal. It is organized according to functionality, presenting explanations of both the fill-in screens and the Program Definition Language (PDL) necessary to create the various parts of a program. You can learn how to create a program in CA Ideal from this guide. Once you learn the basics, you can use the Programming Reference Guide as a reference to the PDL programming language.

This chapter describes the Program Definition Facility that defines and maintains CA Ideal program definitions. This chapter includes the following topics:

• Creating a new program and its components
• Displaying and editing a program
• Duplicating a program to new name
• Deleting a program
• Printing a program
• Listing the programs that were already defined

Programs that CA Ideal uses can be either CA Ideal programs or programs written in the COBOL, PL/I, or Assembler language. CA Ideal defines and maintains CA Ideal programs. The CA Ideal programs are the ideal subprograms. The components of a CA Ideal program definition are explained in the following sections.

COBOL, PL/I, and Assembler programs are written and maintained outside of CA Ideal. You can use these non-Ideal programs only as subprograms of CA Ideal programs. Non-Ideal subprograms must be made known to CA Ideal by defining the program identification and parameter definition components in CA Ideal.

Components of a Program Definition Under CA Ideal

A CA Ideal program definition uses the following components:

• A program identification fill-in creates a program definition and provides descriptive information about it.
• A program resources fill-in specifies the dataviews to use, panels to transmit, reports to generate, and any subprograms called or initiated by this program.
• A working data definition fill-in that is used as a temporary “scratch pad” for local data.
• A parameter definition fill-in describes data passed to this program from a calling program.
• An environment definition fill-in specifies access plan (SQL precompile) options required for programs that use SQL to access CA Datacom/DB.
• A procedure definition fill-in enters PDL statements to express the logic, computations, report production, panel processing, database retrieval, or database maintenance procedures that make up the CA Ideal program. For information on PDL statements, refer to the Programming Reference Guide.

A COBOL, PL/I, or Assembler program definition uses only two components-the program identification and the parameter definition.