Known issues and limitations

Limitations

Early Development Testing on VS Code has the following issues and limitations:

Test creation:
  • Creating tests for programs with alternate ENTRY points is not yet supported.
Test point support:
  • Some statements are not supported as test points yet.
    EXEC DLI - SQL statements with INDICATOR values
  • Test points inside copybooks will not display as test points in a unit test. Only the test points in the main program file will be displayed.
Data editing:
  • Rich UI editing of some COBOL data types is not supported and can only be edited directly via the .ztest test file.
  • To update values that cannot be edited in the UI, edit the test file to change the data item type to hex and then provide a hexadecimal string value. Hexadecimal values are characters in the range "0" to "9" and "A" to "F", inclusive, where two hexadecimal digits represent one byte, and the number of bytes must match the size of the data item.
  • All text is interpreted as code page IBM-1047, even if the compiler CODEPAGE option specified something else. If you need to edit a data item in a different code page, you must edit the test file to change the data item type to hex and then provide a hexadecimal string value. Hexadecimal values are characters in the range "0" to "9" and "A" to "F", inclusive, where two hexadecimal digits represent one byte, and the number of bytes must match the size of the data item.
  • SQL statements have an additional limitation that the SQL type for the host variable must be fixed-length.
  • Some data item values will display in hex. This happens when data has a non-printable characters, or the extension doesn’t know how to decode a type. In this case, data could be edited as hex. In ztest yaml file add type: "hex" at the same level as the variable.
Other:
  • Multi-root VS Code workspace are not supported.
  • Customizing the JCL job card for test jobs is not supported.
  • Interoperability with TAZ Eclipse Unit Test or Early Development Test artifacts is not supported.
  • If you added, removed, or modified test points your recorded data could become invalid, and you will need to re-record. Same applies if you made large modifications to business logic.

Common issues

  • Ensure your program is parsed cleanly. Open the program file and check for any red or yellow squiggles. If program has parsing errors, test points will not be identified correctly and unit test will not function properly.