Course Description

Enterprise COBOL Update II:
Unicode and XML Support

This course: course objectives; course outline;
COBOL curriculum; LE curriculum; z/OS curriculum; Web curriculum; XML curriculum; Topic list; Course list; Home page

Benefits

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-origintated 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.

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.

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.

Related IBM Materials

It is very useful, but not required, to have the supporting IBM manuals for COBOL on hand.

SC27-1408 - COBOL Language Reference
SC27-1412 - COBOL Programming Guide

• 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

Exercises

There are nine hands-on exercises.