Once you decide to write a custom program to query your COBOL file system, one of the first things you need to consider is how much work should be done in COBOL and how much in the application language itself.
For instance, you may find on occasion that you want to elaborate on or change something in the data for some special purpose. For example, you may want to compute totals of data columns (assuming these totals are not already part of the data file).
To perform a custom operation on your data, you can modify your COBOL code, or you can write queries using the language provided with the Windows application itself (for example, WordBasic for Word or Visual Basic for Excel). Deciding how much work to do in COBOL and how much in the application language is an important first step.
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