Re: XML downloaded...how to upload? -- MIDRANGE-L

What you are looking for is called an EAI package....

I can tell what NOT to use...

I am currently working on a very large EAI (Enterprise Application
Integration) project that involves passing document between various systems
using XML.

They company is using an EAI package from SeeBeyond which allows you can
create scripts to parse the XML and use ODBC to insert the data into the
AS/400 database.  It runs slow, it is very difficult to keep running, it is
VERY expensive to purchase, and the vendors software support is terrible.


----- Original Message -----
From: "David Morris" <David.Morris@plumcreek.com>
To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Friday, August 16, 2002 10:15 AM
Subject: Re: XML downloaded...how to upload?


Rick,

There should be no need to convert the file as long as the XML
is encoded in a fixed length format like ISO-8859-1.

A lot depends on whether the data arrives on your AS/400 directly,
how it is being sent, and the languages you feel comfortable with.
One of the first things I would look at if you have experience with
Java is Axis. It will run fine on your iSeries system and provides
support for http and smtp transports. Axis is evolving daily and
IBM recently dumped a lot of their Web services support into the
project (like they did with other Apache projects). A lot of that code

is not fully integrated at this point but what is there and working
satisfies 80% of today's requirements. The other 20% would be
some widely deployed proprietary formats like BizTalk.

You can find out more about Axis at http://xml.apache.org/axis

Once you get your XML file onto your system, you will need to
parse it and write the results to your database. JDom and JTOpen
make that pretty easy if you are OK with Java. I have done some
work in that area and plan to release some code as open source
soon through the iseries-toolkit at http://www.iseries-toolkit.org.
That code does a lot of what IBM's XML extenders product does,
but it is more flexible and more work.


If you are RPGIV literate and on V5R1 or later, I would consider
JDOM from within RPG as a means to parse your XML and write
to a database file. I like the fact that IBM made an XML RPG
parser available, but it is a little too convoluted to recommend.

Another option, if you just want something off the shelf, is to
use the DB2 XML extenders. That solution has a pretty steep
learning curve and is not as easy to use as it should be and has
some serious limitations. It may make sense if you plan on receiving
new document formats all the time and just dumping them into a
similarly structured database.

David Morris

>>> the400man@hotmail.com 08/16/02 07:04AM >>>
We just closed an agreement to receive an EDI - type transmission in
which
the data file will be sent and retrieved in XML format. Having virtualy
no
experience with XML, I have no idea about how or what software might:

1. convert the file to a CSV or text - type format
2. convert to EBCDIC and land it on the AS400

Thanks much.

Rick Rayburn
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