DCLGEN stands for DeCLaration GENerator.It is an IBM provided function which generates INCLUDE members for DB2 tables for use in COBOL and PL/1 programs. These INCLUDE members contain SQL table declarations and working storage structures.
It is the place where the complete data field of the table is present and it is easy to use the data name when ever required. Without dclgen also one can run the program but he has to declare all the things in the working-storage section.
In COBOL DB2 programs the host variables are needed for the column names of the tables. This can be done by a DB2 utility called DCLGEN Declaration Generator. This is primarily a copybook of host variables and also contains table structure and helps in programming reference. We can code this manually but using DCLGEN we can eliminate the mistakes by replacing all underscores in column names into – (hyphens).
