Parse ACUCOBOL Vision Index Files

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: Parse ACUCOBOL Vision Index Files by Old_Gray_Bear (Bishop) on Dec 21, 2009 at 15:46 UTC
In fact, the link you cited talks about a A-VI to CSV/LDIF/COBOL/ISAM/etc conversion tool. You might start with that tool and see how far that gets you. Note: they also point you in the direction of "Acucorp, Inc.'s Complementary Technology Program (CTP)". Becoming a member in the CTP will probably get you access to the formats you desire. Also take a look at this Document, it talks about using ODBC with A-VI I suspect that this particular black-box data format has not been reverse-engineered due to the lack of a large body of Users (as opposed to SMB, when Samba was first developed). If you can demonstrate to the owners of A-VI that having an open format for their product would produce a material benefit for them, they might be amenable to allowing you to build the appropriate Perl bindings. Good Luck, and Good Night. ---- I Go Back to Sleep, Now. OGB	[reply]
Re: Parse ACUCOBOL Vision Index Files by zentara (Cardinal) on Dec 21, 2009 at 12:36 UTC
*The format is proprietary* .... then how are the monks supposed to analyze your problem?..... maybe you could make some fake __DATA__, similar in data structure to the real thing, and say what you are attempting to extract I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Old Perl Programmer Haiku	[reply]
Re^2: Parse ACUCOBOL Vision Index Files by shadow_1 (Initiate) on Jan 26, 2010 at 21:25 UTC
The ACUCOBOL Vision files are usually comprised of two files. One file contains the data portion and one file contains an indexing structure. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish you may or may not need to access both files. To be able to give you more insight about parsing the files requires a knowledge of what version of the Vision file system the files were created with. It would also be helpful to know what options were used when the files were created. When using Acucobol all of these items are automatically handled by the file handler. Do you have Acucobol available? There are many ways to do what you are asking.	[reply]
Re^2: Parse ACUCOBOL Vision Index Files by Anonymous Monk on Dec 21, 2009 at 12:59 UTC
Maybe there is someone who knows the format as it's quite common -- and parsed it already.	[reply]
Re^3: Parse ACUCOBOL Vision Index Files by Anonymous Monk on Dec 21, 2009 at 13:58 UTC
Surely googling would have found that	[reply]
Re: Parse ACUCOBOL Vision Index Files by Anonymous Monk on Feb 14, 2014 at 22:02 UTC
In Q1 2014, IRI (The CoSort Company) is releasing NextForm v3 to convert Vision (and MF-ISAM) index files into flat file formats. NextForm is a data and database migration utility that also supports basic data manipulation, replication, federation, and reporting. CoSort will support these index file formats as well, enabling heavier-duty data transformation, masking, and BI, plus direct DB table population. See http://www.iri.com/products/nextform for more information.	[reply]
Re^2: Parse ACUCOBOL Vision Index Files by Anonymous Monk on Aug 27, 2025 at 16:59 UTC
I know this is a very late response, but just for anyone looking in the future, MF-COBOL is not the same as ACUCOBOL, and they dont even both use VISION, only ACUCOBOL uses VISION. There is a tool available from IRI, for ACUCOBOL and VISION, or Rocket (The new owners of ACUCOBOL) has the XDBC available which can work well with migrating and/or integrating COBOL and a modern DB.	[reply]