Re: XML-INTO - %XML option to treat null element as 0

Don't worry Jon, the idea of a personal attack hadn't even crossed my mind :-)

But I'm still not convinced: I don't see your point about a missing letter, what has that got to do with allow missing/allowextra? It would just be bad data; a customer ID of 'on Paris' would certainly be rejected by the check after the parsing. And a malformed numeric could cause an exception when the target field was numeric; if I had defined the field alpha, it would not pass the check either.

You're right that I'm assuming documents that will fit into memory. I admit I haven't really explored the nuances of using XML-INTO with a handler; if I needed a handler anyway, I would be inclined to use XML-SAX.

Joep Beckeringh



Op 6 mrt. 2013, om 17:00 heeft Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> het volgende geschreven:

On Wed, 6 Mar 2013, at 10:16:43, j.beckeringh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Either I don't understand you or we disagree :-)

Don't you always have to check the data after the parsing? And is 'if
numCustomerID = 0' better than 'if CustomerID = *BLANK'?

Yes - but you're missing the point. What if it was not a missing entry but (say) a letter? Or a numeric formed in a fashion that RPG will not convert? E.g. 12,345.00 or 123CR. Or simply "N/A" or ...

I tend to see the XML-document as a box full of data items; through
XML-INTO I pick out the items that I'm interested in and leave the others
alone (allowextra=yes). Before the parsing I initialize the DS, after the
parsing I check whether I have enough data to do whatever I need to do.
I'd rather do this checking afterwards than having the XML-INTO bomb out
on me.

Fine except that this means that you are always dealing with a document that will fit into memory. If you have to use %Handler this approach will not work as you cannot initialize the memory.

It also means that if the supplier changes names of elements, changes an element from simple to compound, etc. and "forgets" to tell you, you may have no warning. If this doesn't ever happen to you, fine.

So indeed I am using 'allowmissing=yes' and 'allowextra=yes' as defaults
and I'm quite happy with it, thank you very much.

Please note I was not attacking you personally - if this approach works for you fine. But there are many examples out there where extra/missing are alwauys specified/recommended because they were often needed to avoid the problems that early versions of XML-INTO had. I was merely trying to point out for the archives that in most cases these were no longer necessary.

I would still say that using "missing" as a default is a bad idea.


Jon Paris

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