In this part of our RPG XML series, you'll learn how to use RPG's XML-SAX op-code to deal with problematic XML documents and handle situations that XML-INTO cannot deal with.

By Jon Paris

In the previous two articles in this series, "%Handling XML-INTO Problems" and "i5/OS Offers Native XML Support in V5R4", we focused on the capabilities of RPG's XML-INTO. As we saw, this op-code processes an entire document, either as a single piece or, when needed or desired, in "chunks" by using the capabilities of the %HANDLER BIF. There are, however, situations when this will not work for you. This often relates to limitations in RPG's data structure (DS) capabilities. As you know, a named DS is limited to a maximum size of 64K (at least until V6R1 anyway). Suppose that even a single repeating element will not fit into this? That may sound unlikely, but it doesn't take a huge number of repeating text fields to exceed this limit. Another example, and one that seems to occur quite often, arises when your XML document contains a structure that simply cannot be represented in an RPG DS. To illustrate this, take a look at the new version of our XML document, shown below:

Learn how to use host variables to get the most from your embedded SQL statements.

by Adam Glauser

In its simplest form, embedded SQL in RPGLE is not much different from the type of SQL you can run using the RUNSQLSTM command. You can use DDL to create and drop tables; you can even insert and delete rows. However, you will soon find that you will want to have the SQL statement affect different rows, depending on user input or other criteria. That's where host variables can help.