display-length for group differs from sum of group parts

Input:
06 GROUP.
08 PACKED-NUMBER PIC 9(10) USAGE IS COMPUTATIONAL-3.
08 FILLER PIC X(5).

Output:

<copybook filename="test_01.cbl" dialect="Mainframe">
<item level="06" name="GROUP" position="1" storage-length="11" display-length="11">
<item level="08" name="PACKED-NUMBER" picture="9(10)" usage="computational-3" position="1" storage-length="6" display-length="10" numeric="true">
<item level="08" name="FILLER" picture="X(5)" position="7" storage-length="5" display-length="5">
</item>
</item></item></copybook>

The element name "position" is ambiguous, because the storage-position and the display-position can be different.

• Answer: While storage-position is a better name, position is very important and changing it now would break existing code.

      05 Group-1.
         10 Field-1      Pic s9(07)PPP.
         10 Field-2      Pic VPPP999.

For storage-length there is 2 ways of looking at it

• In Cobol Group-1 is in effect a Pic X field (x(10) for the above). For Group-Display-length = storage-length

• Alternatively there is no point for storage-length=display-length.

I will look at

• Changing Display-Length to the sum of the child display length
• adding Display-Position.

I there any reason why you want a Display position and Group-Display-Length

I don't need a separate element group-display-length, using display-length is OK if it sums correctly.
I suspected the position element was too set in stone to be changed.
The copybook I worked with when I saw the sum difference has about 500 fields in 8 levels, packed and signed fields to a storage-length > 1200.
Having group lengths summed and being able to see start positions also for display is helpful as we are moving to a different receiver architecture.

There is a new version

• https://sourceforge.net/projects/cb2xml/files/cb2xml/1.01.1/

that changes Display-length / position.

The change in Group-Display-Length is for all generated Xml files.
The Display-Position tag is only displayed for the new (2017) format
i.e. something like the following

java -jar ../../lib/cb2xml.jar -cobol cbl2xml_Test110.cbl -xml cbl2xml_Test110.cbl.x1.xml -indentXml

There will be a cb2xml-format="2017" on the copybook tag.

The Display Position is also available in the Java interface.