7. Introduction

XML2COB is a complementary tool of TXT2XML. It generates a COBOL copybook, using an XML file as template. Of course, you can use the generated COBOL copybook to convert, with TXT2XML, XML files to text files and vice-versa. However, like TXT2XML, it is not an XML parser written in Rexx, nor will support the entire XML specification.

XML2COB works only with well-formed XML documents. For example, it will never check for missing XML closing tags. XML2COB generates valid COBOL copybooks, but it's still your responsibility to check COBOL clauses like :

• OCCURS
• PICTURE (symbol and length of the item).
• SIGN

As TXT2XML, XML2COB was tested successfully on :

• Windows 2K,
• Linux Mandrake 10.1,
• MVS (OS/390 V2R10).

It should work without problems on other platforms. To run XML2COB on non-mainframe platforms, you must first install Regina Rexx or for windows only, Reginald (see chapter ). Optionally, for the GUI front-end, you may also install Java (see for more details). Should you succeed or encounter problems in running XML2COB on a non-tested platform, please send an e-mail to :

sunuraxi@users.sourceforge.net

XML2COB is released under the GPL license (see appendix ).