What is PeopleSoft Remote Cobol Call?
Not all the PeopleSoft modules use Cobol and even those which use Cobols — not all of them use the Remote Call. PeopleSoft Cobol programs that use remote call can be found in NA Payroll, FSCM etc.
PeopleSoft Remote Call programs can be frustrating at times. Sometimes they may break for no reason. And of course NA Payroll is especially vulnerable because you apply tax updates 6 times a year and compile Cobol programs. Let us try to understand this Remote Cobol feature and hopefully that would help you troubleshoot remote call issues.
What is PeopleSoft Remote Call?
Remote Call is a PeopleTools feature that enables executing a COBOL program remotely from within a PeopleSoft application. Remote calls are made using the RemoteCall PeopleCode function.
The purpose of the RemoteCall PeopleCode function is to allow PeopleCode programs to invoke PeopleSoft application COBOL programs.
In the application server configuration file, you can specify where the COBOL executables are located.
To ensure that the Remote Call function is working properly, you can make use of the Cobol program PTPNTEST.
Before you can test, you need to ensure that RCCBL Redirect is set to 1 in psappsrv.cfg. By default it is set to 0, so if it not already 1, change it to 1 and restart appserver for the change to take effect. 0 means redirection is disabled whereas 1 means redirection is enabled.
This RCCL Redirect feature is for the purpose of debugging only and it does not need to be enabled for remote call to work in PeopleSoft application. Enabling this feature causes system overhead and slows overall performance because redirection causes the server process to retain intermediate work files that are used to pass parameter values between the server process and a Remote Call/COBOL program for debugging purposes. This process also generates Remote Call trace information in the COBOL output files.
If set to 0, the system generates no COBOL output files. If set to 1 (enabled), the system generates rmtcall_in.<pid>, rmtcall_out.<pid> and rmtcall_cblmsg.<pid> files in the LOGS directory of your appserver domain.
Remote Call Cobol can be tested by going to: PeopleTools -> Utilities -> Debug -> People Tools Test Utilities
If testing via process scheduler, the output files of Remote call will be located in the log_output directory of your process scheduler domain.
The parameter RCCBL PRDBIN is used to provide the location of the path of the compiled Cobol programs. By default it refers to PS_HOME/cblbin%PS_COBOLTYPE% which equates to PS_HOME/cblbina or PS_HOME/cblbine or PS_HOME/cblbinu for Non-Unicode or EBCDIC or Unicode respectively.
