🚀 go-pugleaf

Matthew wrote:

> I have a Random Access File that was created from a program written
> in COBOL.  When the program was written they never created a way to
> export the data.
> 
> Can anyone tell me how to reverse engineer a Random Access File?  Or
> a place were I can get some information?

A random-access file has some number of records M, each of fixed size
N.  The first step is to determine how many records there are in the
file; this should be pretty straightforward.  The size N of each record
is therefore (length of file)/M.

This assumes that there is no header record.  If there is, you'll have
to figure out the length of the header record and subtract it from the
file length.

Figuring out the content of each record is much harder.  For this,
you'll need to find someone who understands COBOL who can find an
instance where a record is being read from the file.  You can then
identify the individual fields.

Numeric fields present a special problems.  Depending how old the
system is, the format in which numbers are stored in the file may not
be any recognizable standard and you may not be able to extract them
from the file.

The usual approach for this kind of thing is to get someone to write a
COBOL export program that exports the data to plain text.
Reverse-engineering flat files is very time-consuming.

-- 
Kevin Dean [TeamB]
Dolphin Data Development Ltd.
http://www.datadevelopment.com/

NEW WHITEPAPERS
Team Development with JBuilder and Borland Enterprise Server
Securing Borland Enterprise Server
http://www.datadevelopment.com/papers/index.html

Please see Borland's newsgroup guidelines at
http://info.borland.com/newsgroups/guide.html