Overall Functionality (COBOL Copybook Data Parsing, Encoding, Parser and Encoder)

COBOL Copybook Encoder facilitates user to handle COBOL Copybook coded data (more specifically speaking, it is a fixed length field based encoding mechanism). The implementation of the COBOL Copybook encoder provides tools for user to define and test COBOL Copybook encoders, as well as provide runtime support for COBOL Copybook encoders. COBOL Copybook encoder definition, which is represented in form of XSD, is used in WSDL just like normal XSDs with the convention that usually an element declaration that represents a copybook is used in the Part definition, not any of the XML types.

In composite applications, COBOL Copybook encoder is used the same way as all other encoder types are used, which is, in the WSDL's binding section specifying the encoding style in the encoding style property of a message type. Currently the encoding style value for using COBOL Copybook encoder is "cocoencoder-1.0".
To learn more about the COBOL Copybook, please read COBOL language specification.
To learn more about encoder in general, please visit An Introduction to Encoder.

Keywords: COBOL Copybook, Data, Parsing, Encoding, Parser, Encoder, XML, Conversion, Converter, XML Schema

High Level Requirements

The requirements of COBOL Copybook encoder fall into two categories: the design time tools and runtime support. The design time tools shall facilitate user to import and view COBOL Copybook encoder definition, as well as discover its runtime behavior at design time. COBOL Copybook encoder runtime support shall provide efficient and fast algorithms that decode COBOL Copybook encoded message into XML encoded message and encode XML encoded message into COBOL Copybook encoded message.

Use Cases

• Import COBOL Copybook definition into a NetBeans project. Pick the External COBOL Copybook Definition Wizard and import an external COBOL Copybook definition file as is into a NetBeans project. The file name has an extension of ".cpy".
• Generate XSD from a COBOL Copybook definition. Right click a COBOL Copybook definition and then click on Generate XSD to generate an XSD from the Copybook definition.
• View COBOL Copybook abstract message structure. This use case should have been cover by NetBeans XSD editor.
• View COBOL Copybook encoding rules at node level, such as PICTURE X(3) etc.
• Editing COBOL Copybook encoder definition is allowed but not required.
• Test COBOL Copybook encoder's runtime encoding/decoding behavior at design time
• Specify the COBOL Copybook encoding style for different binding styles (such as CICS, FTP, FILE, JMS etc.)
• Provide COBOL Copybook decoding/encoding support at runtime

Technical Details

• COBOL Copybook encoder definition is stored in XSDs.
• The abstract message structure is defined by normal XSD constructs.
• The specific COBOL Copybook encoding rules is stored in XSD's Annotation/AppInfo contructs.
• COBOL Copybook encoder viewer (potentially can do editing also) is NetBeans XSD editor plus an overlay/plug-in (which is called AppInfo provider) on top of it. The plug-in shows an COBOL Copybook encoding node underneath the Annotation node.
• COBOL Copybook encoder parser uses SAX interface to return decoded data, so it can do streaming parsing.
• For either DISPLAY or DISPLAY1 data, a code page must be specified.
• Redefinition is handled as multiple siblings within a sequence group.

Want To Try It Out?

Please follow the steps outlined at the Encoder Feature Installation Guide page to proceed with the encoder feature installation.

This page (revision-3) was last changed on 10-Dec-09 17:04 PM, -0800 by LixinTang.
This page was created on 13-Aug-07 14:57 PM, -0700 by JunXu.

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