COBOL to web page solved

I was trying to get a COBOL program to generate a
report that displayed as a web page.  My first
strategy was to make a COBOL program write an XML
file.  This proved more of a headache than it was
worth.

The strategy that worked for me was to: (1) CALL a
COBOL program that writes a report in HTML format to a
DB2 flat file, (2) use the copy to PC document command
(CPYTOPCD) to transform the DB2 file into a text file,
and (3) use the send distribution command (SNDDST) to
email the web page report to users.  All these steps
were carried out within a CL program.

I'm still experimenting with writing directly from
COBOL to stream files.  It would cut out the CPYTOPCD
processing.

Just for the curious, the problems I had with XML
included:
(1) the end-of-file label added to text files by
commands like CPYTOPCD and CPYTOSMF disrupts the
well-formedness of the XML document,
(2) an ampersand ('&') between tags can disrupt the
well-formedness of the XML document (and many of our
corporate partner names have an '&' in them), and
(3) the rendering of XML as a web page using XSL was
noticably slower than the loading an HTML document
into the browser (this is an issue with larger
reports).

Thanks for the help! I really value this list.

Kelly Cookson


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