The AcuXML Interface

The AcuXML interface is a transparent interface between ACUCOBOL-GT applications and XML documents. Part of the standard ACUCOBOL-GT runtime system, AcuXML dynamically reads and generates XML using data dictionaries created at compile time. As the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime module executes your COBOL application, the interface runs "behind the scenes" to match up the requirements of both the application and the data. You do not need to know XML to use the interface.

With the interface, an ACUCOBOL-GT program can read whichever XML files a user indicates. Because XML files are by nature sequential, AcuXML can read the files specified for input, process them, and return files in the desired data format.

The ACUCOBOL-GT program can also open any COBOL file that is required for a user request (whether it is indexed, relative, or sequential), read and process that data, and output a sequential file that is in XML format. Using configuration variables, you can specify which files you want to be XML documents, and whether you want ACUCOBOL-GT to generate raw XML, XML documents with DTDs, or XML documents with schemas. For our purposes, the XML documents are considered transient–more of a data transport mechanism than a data storage mechanism.

Please note that reading an XML file and then writing it as XML with the same data does not necessarily produce an identical file. The information is the same, but the markup or "wrappers" likely are not.