CICS COBOL XML Workshop

Many large organisations are incorporating XML data into existing enterprise applications. Where business critical data is stored in proprietary data formats and transports, implementing XML can greatly simplify data exchange. Many non-COBOL solutions exist for converting XML data into the data structures required by existing business logic. IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS provides a high performance XML parser.

This course is only available for one-company, on-site presentations.

What you will learn

On successful completion of this course you will be able to:

incorporate XML data into existing enterprise applications
format an XML document
build COBOL data structures
handle XML encoding
handle errors in XML
process XML and XHMTL.

Who Should Attend

CICS application programmers & application support personnel.

Prerequisites

At least one year of experience in CICS COBOL development.

Duration

2 days

Fee (per attendee)

P.O.A.

This includes free online 24/7 access to course notes.

Hard copy course notes are available on request from rsmshop@rsm.co.uk

at £50.00 plus carriage per set.

Course Code

CXML

Introduction

Terminology; what is an event-based non-conforming parser?

Processing XML Documents

Introduction to XML parse verb and XML special registers.

Processing XML Events

Format of an XML document: start-of-document, version, encoding, content-character, start-of-element, attribute characters, processing-instruction, CDATA sections end-of-element and end-of-document.

Building COBOL Data Structures

Techniques used when moving XML data to COBOL data items; new COBOL functions NUMVAL and NUMVAL-C.

Understanding XML Encoding

Alphanumeric data items that are encoded using single byte EBCDIC and ASCII character sets; National data items that are encoded using Unicode UTF-16; Examine the National data items defined with USAGE NATIONAL to hold Unicode strings and the new COBOL functions to convert alphanumeric and integer data to national data.

Handling Errors in XML

Using the ON EXCEPTION phrase and processing non-fatal errors.

Processing XML and XHMTL

CICS WEB SUPPORT commands used to send and receive the XML exploit CICS WEB SEND, WEB RECEIVE, WEB WRITE and DOCUMENT CREATE commands. Note: RSM/Circle's 5-day CICS Web Support Programming Workshop covers all the CICS WEB commands and HTML processing in detail.

Introduction to SOA

Practical

The case study involves using CICS to display an XML XFORM on a web browser to directly input XML into a CICS system. The XML input will then be parsed by a COBOL application, data retrieved from a data store (VSAM file) and the output XML displayed on a XHTML page.