Comments on: Enterprise Cobol obtaining calling program name http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/itanswers/enterprise-cobol-obtaining-calling-program-name/ Sat, 18 May 2013 07:52:31 +0000 hourly 1 By: meandyou http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/itanswers/enterprise-cobol-obtaining-calling-program-name/#comment-73398 meandyou Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:30:38 +0000 #comment-73398 In MVS (z/OS) COBOL, this would be quite a trick. it isn’t easy even in Assembler.

You will need to access the CDE chain and dig thru protected memory. This is the calling chain that you see in a dump.

Or maybe it could be done by accessing the savearea of the calling program and determine which program owns that piece of storage; not sure how to code that.

I know I have seen code pieces that address this, but it has been a LONG time. You might try some more mainframe centric sites like IBM’s DeveloperWorks.

Some people make it a practice to include the name of the caller in the parms passed to the called module. maybe like this:

   IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
   PROGRAM-ID.   PROG001.

   WORKING STORAGE SECTION.
   01  PARMS-PASSED.
       05  CALLER              PIC X(8)    VALUE 'PROG001'.
       05  REAL-DATA        PIC ....
 
   PROCEDURE DIVISION.
   ...
   CALL 'PROG002' USING PARMS-PASSED.

This would be a lot of work to retro-fit into an existing application system. But you might remember it for the future.

]]>