Enterprise COBOL Update II: Unicode and XML Support

Course Number:  647-TF
Recommended Duration:  2 days

Intended Audience
Experienced z/OS or OS/390 COBOL application programmers.  Students should already be familiar with the LE COBOL compiler family and its capabilities.  The course "Enterprise COBOL Update I: Essentials" or equivalent knowledge is assumed.

Objectives
Students who complete this course will be able to use the Unicode and XML processing capabilities of the IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS and OS/390 compiler.  This enables students to build routines to convert Web-originated XML transactions to classic COBOL data structure based transactions and back.  This course also provides a survey of new COBOL features as they are introduced for each new version / release.  There are nine hands-on exercises.

Prerequisites
At the very least, the student entering this course should have a strong programming background in COBOL.  The installation must be using the Enterprise COBOL compiler and have Unicode support services activated.

Topics

• Introduction to Unicode

• National data type

• Intrinsic functions: DISPLAY-OF, NATIONAL-OF

• Introduction to XML

• The XML PARSE statement

• The XML Special registers

• XML Events

• Coding processing procedures

• Extracting character string fields while parsing

• Extracting numeric fields while parsing

• Handling exceptions while parsing

• The XML GENERATE statement

• Handling attributes and namespaces

• The Enterprise COBOL V4R1 enhancements to XML work