i got a customer who wants to migrate from an old Fujitsu COBOL based system to our system, said that, he wants his old data to be kept in the new system, like products,manufacters, etc.I dont have the COBOL source file, i have: .DAT files, .RDD files and .FDD files.
Apparently the .DAT files are in the INDEXED organization, a sample file output bellow:
FDD output:http://textuploader.com/kxdv
RDD output:http://textuploader.com/kxdw
I can't simple read the .DAT file in notepad, i've tried the SiberDataViewer but unsuccesfull, also it gets paid to export the data.
If there's a way, can i write a program to export all these files to csv,dbf,postgres format? If you are still reading, thank you.
I do not know Fujitsu COBOL but as I see it there are a few ways you might be able to get at the data:
0) Have your customer (or someone with a compatible Fujitsu COBOL compiler) write a COBOL program to read the INDEXED file and output a SEQUENTIAL file.
1) Find a Fujitsu COBOL utility to do the same.
2) Find a product that can read the INDEXED file and export it into something you can use. I'm thinking of products like Cyberquery or Crystal Reports, etc. Or, after I saw that the FDD/RDD files were produced by Siber Systems, a quick search helped me find their "Cobol DataViewer" product; use that to output it to a "more common and usable format" ;-)
I could convert it using the Siber DataViewer, but, its full version is paid.
Related
I've been reading on the compilation process, I understand some of the earlier concepts like parsing but I stop short of understanding how the executable file is created at the end.
In the examples I've seen around the "compiler" takes input in the form of a lang defined by BNF and then upon parsing it outputs assembly.
Is the executable file literally just that assembly in binary form? I feel like this can't be the case given that there are applications for making executables from assembly?
If this isn't answerable (ie it's too complex for the stack overflow format) I'd totally be happy with links/books so I can educate myself.
The compiler (or more specifically, the linker) creates the executable.
The format of the file generally vary depending on the operating system.
There are currently two main formats ELF and COFF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_and_Linkable_Format
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COFF
If you understand the concept of a structure, this is the same, only within a file. Each file has a first structure called a header, and from there you can access the other structures as required.
In most cases, only the resulting binary code is saved in these files, although you often find debug information. Some formats could save the source along the code, but now a day it only saves the necessary references to the source.
With dynamic linking, you also find symbol tables that include the actual symbol name. Otherwise, only relocation tables would be required.
Under the Amiga we also had the possibility to define code in a "segment". Only one segment could be loaded at a time. Once you were done with the segment, you could unload it and load another. Yet, in the end the concepts were similar. Structures in a file.
Microsoft offers a PDF about the COFF format. I could not find it on their website just now, but it looks like others have it. ELF has many links in the Wikipedia page so you should be able to find a PDF to get started.
Not all but some (gcc, etc) compilers go from the high level language to assembly language then spawn the assembler. The assembler reads the assembly language and generates machine code and generates an object file which as you have guessed contains more than just the machine code bits. If you think of it for second you may realize that a variable or function that is defined in another source file which means its code lives in another object file, until link time one object doesnt know how to get at that external function, so 1) the machine code is not finished, patching up external addresses is not done until link time 2) there needs to be some information in the object file that defines what public items are in this object file and what external items are missing, names of functions for example which are obviously not embedded in the machine code. So the objects have machine code in various states of completion as well as other data needed by the linker. the linker then...links...the objects together into one program with everything resolved, it basically completes all the machine code and puts the fragments of machine code (in separate objects) into one place. Then it has to save all that on the disk in some format and typically that format is not just raw machine code. It has extra stuff in the file, starting with a header and the a way to define each binary blob and where it needs to live in memory before executing. When you run a program on the command line of your operating system or double clicking or whatever in a file manager gui, the operating system knows how to read that file format, extract the blobs of binary, place those blobs of binary in ram defined by this file format and then start executing at the place defined by this file format.
aout, elf, coff, intel hex, motorola s-record are all popular formats as well as raw binary which some toolchains can produce. the gnu tools will default to one (coff or elf or exe or aout) and then objcopy is used to convert from one to another or at least the default one to the others and there is help to show what your possible choices are. then simply google those or wikipedia them and find the definitions of the file formats. Intel hex or motorola srecord are good ones to start with at wikipedia then elf perhaps.
if you want to produce native executable file you have 2 options. you can assembly the binary form yourself or you can transalte your program to another language and use its compiler to producte the executable
I have an old software that I believe was done in Delphi and uses .rep files for reports.
Is there any way to figure out what report builder was used? Opening the file in HEX or Text only doesn't really tell a lot, it shows quite some text that is used within the report though.
Thanks
Patrick
Candidates:
A Visual dBase file, it that case it should be mainly ASCII text, but your question seems to rule that out.
A (SAP) Business Objects Report file
An Act! (CRM software) report file
A Grand Theft Auto San Andreas game replay file.
Since you say it is 'used for report', BO is your best bet. It was acquired by SAP in 2007, before that it was standalone software produced by Business Objects AG.
So you probably need a copy of that to open the file.
Maybe there are other ways to inspect/use the file, other people have faced the same problem
Quite simply without access to the source code, you have no way of knowing. None of the major third party Delphi reporting components (Quick Reports, Rave, Crystal, Report Builder, Fast Reports/Free Report) I'm aware of use *.rep as their default file extension. That isn't to say that the program authors didn't use one of these components, but opted to replace the tool's default extension with *.rep. There's also the possibility that the program's authors used their own custom and proprietary reporting system.
You could potentially take one of these .Rep files and try and load them into each Delphi reporting tool and see what the results are but I think your chances of success are exceedingly low.
I have an old help file project, but the original project was lost in a hard drive crash. The original was created using HelpScribble, but now I've decompiled it into WinCHM. I have recreated the help file after decompiling the original compiled CHM file. However, to my knowledge, there is no way to identify the mappings to direct an application to certain Context ID's.
What I'm wondering is if there's a way to read the compiled CHM file and extract the Context ID of each topic in the help file? I would hate to have to iterate through individual numbers from 0 to 5,000 from what I've seen in the original software source. This is a large system, and has a corresponding large help file for every possible scenario in the software.
You can use the chmls tool from the FreePascal project. Invoke it like this:
chmls extractalias MyHelpFile.chm
The output are files named MyHelpFile.ali and MyHelpFile.h containing the IDs and targets of your aliases.
I have been asked to update a program written in 1987 in Delphi (I guess). I have no documentation about this program only a few side notes the programmer took that don't make too much sense to make.
The cd show this files:
Size | Filename
19956 VP.DTA
142300 VP.LEX
404 VP.NDX
126502 VP.RCS
131016 VP.SCR
150067 VP.XEL
101791 vp.exe
Is anyone of this files a database? If so can I access it's data?
I tried several code decompilers but they show a message saying it was not a Win32 compatible application.
The program run in MS-DOS.
Is it possible to obtain the source code? Can I use this code in any way to build a new application?
Update01: I can run the program in MS-DOS. The program conjugate verbs and shows an example sentence where the verb can be used. The GUI is a little bit confusing and there is no help menu so I can't see all the capabilities of the program.
Update02: In conversation with the owner of the program we found another solution. He ask me if it was possible to have the program in a server and the clients could login in with a user and a password and execute the program in a terminal. I have an account in my university server, which I can access throughout ssh and compile and execute c programs in it. The server is in linux so I couldn't try the program in it. If I set up a windows server, can I have multiple people accessing and executing the program in a terminal? The program is an exe. Doesn't this raise some security issues?
Delphi is from mid nineties, so that probably means Delphi's ancestor Turbo Pascal, not Delphi.
Some extensions sound familiar, as shortened versions of words:
ndx = index
dta = data
scr = screen (?)
lex = lexicon (list of words or deduped strings in general) (?)
Screen was sometimes used for e.g. helpscreens, a medieval form of helpfiles, they are typicall ansi screens that can be loaded directly into screen memory
There is a fair chance that this is something handcrafted, specially if that date of 1987 and the general assumption "pascal" is true, and not generated by some known database package at all.
Reverseengineering the fileformat might be a more worthwhile way than trying to reverseengineering the app.
A good start would to be to take a the unix "file" command to see if it can recognize the file types. (the file command searches for signatures inside files, and there are windows ports. I use Cygwin's)
A devel experienced in such matters can also see a lot from a hexdump (specially the first parts of a file)
Is it possible to obtain the source code?
Probably not, you may want to look at something like IDA Pro which can disassemble applications to C using something like Hex-Rays.
Do you know what the application is supposed to be?
If it's ms-dos, you're probably better off just drawing up new requirements and doing new development.
Look for DeDe to reverse engineering a delphi compiled program. But as far as i know, delphi is a real compiler. So there is no way to de-compiled it. If you are able to read assembler code then you can try de-compile it. Clipper and Foxpro (dos version) are another stories cause they not real compiler.
This is definitely not Delphi. It might be one of the database centric languages like Clipper 1. .SCR probably means "screen" and defines I/O masks. .NDX is a table index and .DTA means "data".
If it is clipper, you might actually be lucky, because as far as I remember these programs were P code, so it could be possible to decompile it.
It looks like CLipper (NDX and SCR). If you have a DBF file then it's Clipper for sure. But some people renamed the DBF to something like DAT. If it is Clipper, I believe there was a decompile named Valkyrie.
We need to export a QuickReport so that it can be opened with the latest Excel 2010 in xlsx format. This link provides a solution. But it did not work for us.
Anyone have ideas?
UPDATE
The version we are using is QuickReports 5 - We just got it.
Clarification of "does not work". The filter allows the report to be saved with an xml extension. And inspecting the file it is valid xml data. But we also inspected a xlsx file. But it does not look the same.
Maybe a dumb question, but are you quite sure you need to do this? New versions of Excel can still open old-fashioned .XLS files.
As for the "XML" exporter you linked to "not working", I think you've misunderstood what it does. It writes an XML file suitable for use with Excel's XML importer. This is very different to an .XLSX format file,
You could try a third party product like Gnostice eDocEngine. It would allow you to export to .xls. If you were feeling particularly masochistic you could do some sort of COM automation to convert the report yourself (i.e. parse the report and fill in the appropriate cells in excel)