CICS COBOL XML Workshop

Objectives
On successful completion of this course, attendees 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

Course Code
CXML
Contents
Introduction
Terminology; what is an event-based non-conforming parser?


Processing XML documents
Introduction to XML parse verb and XML special registers.


Processing XML even
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.


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.