As you maintain your MVS COBOL code, you might need to display the hexadecimal (or hex) value of COBOL statements or data while editing or browsing. You can complete this action using IBM Developer for zSystems and its built-in language-specific editor, the COBOL Editor. This editor combines the common features and workflow of modern text editors with support for MVS COBOL language code.

This COBOL language-specific editor provides you with the ability to toggle on a hexadecimal display line in the editor. This display line persists as you move through the code, making it a very handy feature. This tutorial shows you how to open COBOL source in the COBOL language-specific editor and toggle on the hexadecimal display line.

Prerequisites

To take advantage of this feature, you need:

IBM Developer for zSystems (IDz) software, installed and configured with a connection to an MVS LPAR
Basic understanding of IDz navigation concepts, including the context menu (check out our no-charge IDz Remote Training options)
A COBOL language source member to load in to the COBOL language-specific editor.

Estimated time

This process should take about 5 minutes from start to finish, starting from your Windows/Mac desktop.

Steps

Open IDz and specify a workspace. A workspace is a folder or directory on your computer that contains metadata (or data about data) around any customizations you have made to the IDz workbench.
To ensure that you are starting in the correct perspective within the workbench, navigate to Window > Perspective > Open Perspective and make sure that the z/OS Projects perspective is selected.
From the z/OS Projects perspective, navigate to the z/OS Projects view, expand the IDz Tech Portal folder, and drill down to find TRTMNT.cbl in the COBOL source folder within.
Right-click on TRTMNT.cbl and choose Open With > COBOL Editor.

You should also see other editors that are available to use when editing. In the IDz instance that these screen captures are taken from, the LPEX editor is the default editor for COBOL code, so doing the right-click > Open With > COBOL Editor is a neccessary step. Your installation may already use the COBOL Editor as the default editor for COBOL code, in which case you would not need to do the right-click > Open With procedure. To find out if your installation of IDz is set up to use the COBOL Editor as the default editor for COBOL source code, see if your COBOL source member icons look like what is shown in the screen shot below.
When the source file is open, look at the toolbar at the top of the workbench. Find the hex edit toggle button and click it, toggling it on.

This brings up a UI at the bottom of the source editor that displays the hex code. This UI persists when moving the cursor up and down through the code, allowing you to have a continuous view of the hexadecimal values within the code at any given time.

Summary

In this tutorial, you opened the IDz workbench and then opened a COBOL source member in the COBOL language-specific editor. You then enabled a persistent hex display/edit line within the editor. This feature can be toggled on and off very easily depending on your need to view hex values in your code, making this a top-notch feature in the COBOL language-specific editor.

Next steps

Check out more COBOL content, including tutorials, articles, blog posts, and other resources:

IBM Developer COBOL hub

Enable persistent hexadecimal editing capabilities in a COBOL language-specific editor

Enable persistent hexadecimal editing capabilities in a COBOL language-specific editor