XML Extensions

Use XML Extensions to import and export XML documents to and from COBOL working storage. XML Extensions also has support for XSLT stylesheets, allowing you to apply XSLT transformations to the XML document during import, export, or a transformation from one XML document to another. Further support is provided for testing whether a document is well-formed (syntactically correct) or valid with respect to a provided schema document.

XML is the universal format for structured documents and data on the World Wide Web. Adding "structure" to documents facilitates searching, sorting, or any one of a variety of operations that can be performed on an electronic document.

XML Extensions has many capabilities. The major features support the ability to import and export XML documents to and from COBOL working storage. Specifically, XML Extensions allows data to be imported from an XML document by converting data elements (as necessary) and storing the results into a matching COBOL data structure. Similarly, data is exported from a COBOL data structure by converting the COBOL data elements (as necessary) and storing the results in an XML document.

XML Extensions runs on Microsoft Windows operating systems and selected UNIX platforms. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available.

Note:

The term "Windows", "UNIX" and "Linux" in this document refer to any of the platforms supported by Visual COBOL, unless specifically stated - see Supported Operating Systems and Third-party Software for a full list.
XML Extensions makes use of underlying XML parsers from other vendors. On Windows, development uses a specific version and service pack of Microsoft's MSXML, which is included with your installation. Microsoft will occasionally ship updates to a given version and service pack that either enhance security or fix problems. You can monitor their web site for the latest updates, although it might not be advisable to update to a higher version or service pack. Contact Micro Focus Customer Care to ensure that the update is necessary.
On UNIX or Linux systems, XML Extensions is developed and tested with specific libxml and libxslt shared libraries (*.so files) from the GNOME project for each release. Thus, these may be updated to later versions than the ones provided with Visual COBOL, but again you should contact Micro Focus Customer Care to determine if the later version is necessary and supported.