Re: New XML Project

RWMunday wrote:

I ordered the XML book from Midrange Press and it will be waiting for me
when I arrive home on Friday afternoon. Until then, where can I go for an
overview of XML with RPG on the i5?

If you are working with V5R4 or later, you can use RPG's native XML handling in many cases. Really massive XML documents may be cumbersome due to RPG's data structure size limitations. Jon Paris has a series of articles on this functionality, one of which is http://www.mcpressonline.com/programming/rpg/rpg-has-sax-appeal.html.

V5R1 to V5R3, you can use Scott Klement's port of the Expat XML parser, see http://www.scottklement.com/expat/ for details. I believe Google will turn up some tutorial-style articles from Scott on the topic. Actually, you can use this in V5R4+ too, but I'm not aware of any compelling reason to choose Expat over native RPG XML processing. Expat is probably a bit more difficult to get going with, but might be more flexible.

Expat is what I've used for my XML parsing needs, and it works well for me. One thing to be aware of is that you should try to read all of Scott's articles and all of examples included with the package, because the later one use some cleaner techniques that take advantage of some RPG features added at later V5 releases, such as the ability to have the open() function for stream files do automatic ASCII-EBCDIC conversion instead of having to call iconv() directly.

Another option is the DB2 Extenders for XML from IBM. This is an extra-charge add on to DB2/i5. There have been discussions of it on this list from users of the product.

I'm sure there are lots of possibilities if you bring Java in to the mix, but I'm not at all familiar with that end of the spectrum.

There are also vendors in this space. I've looked in to the RPG-XML Suite from Krengeltech. I've only looked at the documentation, but the API seemed handy and well-thought out to me. Aaron Bartell would be able to tell you more about this one.