CodeTurn Natural to C#

Astadia Natural Transformations

Many of today’s mainframe applications that were developed in SAG Natural and Adabas are still mission critical and continue to deliver significant benefits to the organizations that use and rely upon them. Nevertheless, the Total Cost of Ownership and technological risk associated with these applications have now escalated to unacceptably high levels. 

CodeTurn for Natural conversion provides an opportunity to liberate these valuable and reliable business systems from their dependency upon non-strategic, legacy technologies and enable them to be integrated with state of the art components. Our CodeTurn tool supports COBOL, Java, and C# as target languages.

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Product Highlights

CodeTurn for Natural takes any application developed in Natural and automatically converts it into a fully identical application, but designed to run within an alternative environment on the same platform, or a different platform altogether. The new application is completely free of dependencies on Natural technology and, instead, uses modern and industry standard development tools such as Java, .NET and COBOL, to allow flexible application integration and extension.

Migrate From Anywhere

The Astadia conversion process utilizes Natural’s SYSTRANS output format to migrate the Natural artifacts. This approach largely isolates the conversion from the underlying system, therefore every Natural mainframe platform is supported: IBM mainframe (z/OS, z/VSE) and Fujitsu BS2000.

Migrate Applications to Any Platform

A migrated application can run on Open Systems running Linux, Unix or Windows (LUW) or in the Cloud. The chosen target platform is simply selected as a configuration option during the conversion process.

Additional tools handle the transformation of other source types, such as JCL, Assembler and COBOL programs etc., ensuring that the entire application runs on the new platform.

Client Technology Compatibility

End-users can connect to the application with either a web‑browser or their current Terminal Emulator.

The fact that the Terminal Emulator can optionally be retained for connection to the migration application enables the switch-over to be 100% transparent to end-users.

Many Natural mainframe applications are enhanced or integrated through third party screen-scraping technology. Astadia migrations provide byte-to-byte compatibility with the existing mainframe protocols, therefore screen-scrapers remain compatible even on Open Systems.

Database Access

The Adabas, VSAM or DB2 data and structures are converted to RDBMS using our DataTurn tool. The data access statements in the Natural code use IO Modules to access the RDBMS, and these are also generated by DataTurn. Using IO Modules abstracts the specifics of the underlying RDBMS from the application.

Migration Architecture

Here is an overview of the Architecture when migrating from Natural/Adabas to C# running on Linux, Unix, or Windows.

Parametrization of Generated C# Code

The C# code that is generated through CodeTurn can be parametrized to best integrate within the customer development environment.

• Handling of reinput statements;
• C# namespace naming conventions;

Complete Natural Coverage

Natural is recognized as a rich and powerful development environment. The Astadia migration tools provide support for advanced Natural language features, including:

• High-precision Natural computations (29 digits)
• Natural Reinput statements
• Natural Escape handling
• Multi-lingual user interfaces
• Adabas, VSAM and DB2 data sources

Adabas Migration

The Adabas database and all its data are migrated automatically to a relational database (RDBMS).

• The migration tools support all of the leading RDBMS products
• All DDL is created fully automatic
• The data model can be normalized or de-normalized, or a hybrid
• The migration tools can map the Adabas Date and Time fields to native RDMBS Date and Time fields

Automated Testing

The converted application is tested with Astadia’s TestMatch and DataMatch. Using these tools significantly reduces the time and effort needed to complete the project:

• TestMatch eliminates the need to manually create test scenarios for the complete application
• DataMatch enables quasi automatic testing of batch jobs
• Both limit the end-user involvement in the project for acceptance testing

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Additional Resources

Adabas & Natural migrations

CodeTurn Natural to COBOL Fact Sheet

CodeTurn Natural to Java Fact Sheet

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Visit our Case Studies to see how automation can help organizations accelerate digital transformation.

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