Creating your own program template

When you create a new COBOL program in Elastic COBOL, you can choose from a few different templates to base your program on. In this article, we will show you how to add your own template into the wizard.

These are the default options available:

To add your own template, enter the following in your command-console:

C:\> cd "\your-elastic-cobol-dir\plugins\com.heirloomcomputing.ecd.ui_YY.MM.DD\program_templates"

C:\> mkdir myTemplate

C:\> xcopy /s default myTemplate

C:\> cd myTemplate

Or on Linux/UNIX:

$ cd "/your-elastic-cobol-dir/plugins/com.heirloomcomputing.ecd.ui_YY.MM.DD/program_templates"

$ cp -R default myTemplate

$ cd myTemplate

Edit "template.properties" and change the "name=" value to "myTemplate". You can also change the values of description.short and description.long to custom values of your own.

The "order=" value indicates the order that each template will appear in the wizard. If you want to change this, you will need to examine the other order values in each of the different "template.properties" files.

In the directory you will see: fixed.cbl,  free.cbl and variable.cbl

Edit each of these to so they contain your desired template.

Next time you create a new COBOL program, your custom template will appear:

You can also change the default compiler and runtime settings for your program template.