The software I am supporting has a user screen which builds and saves enquiry statements (English/Access/Recall). I recently created another screen to allow users to use the defined statement/report to output XML to the &HOLD& file and to transfer the results to their PC. All well and good, but then I found that Excel wouldn't pick up the results properly. The reason for this is that the XML output is not quite to the standard. For example, the command
>LIST VOC 'VOC' F1 F2 TOXML gives the result ------------------------------------------ <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ROOT> <VOC _ID = "VOC" F1 = "F" F2 = "VOC"/> </ROOT> ------------------------------------------ While the command >LIST VOC 'VOC' F1 F2 TOXML HEADING "WAHOO 'D'" gives the result ------------------------------------------ WAHOO 08 May 2008 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ROOT> <VOC _ID = "VOC" F1 = "F" F2 = "VOC"/> </ROOT> ------------------------------------------ It's not absolutely clear from the W3C standard itself, but it is very clear from the examples given with it; that the output must start with the string "<?xml ". That is to say, although line feeds and spaces are effectively ignored within XML, they are not catered for before the "<?xml " string. And while the traditional Pick 'thing' is to "make-it-work-if-possible", Excel follows the (arguably more standard) convention of "holy-heck-that's-not-right-do-nothing" What I had to put in place was an extra bit of code to read in the output, delete any lines before the "<?xml " string, and re-write the output (which, by the way, I'm unsure will work for very, very, very large reports). That's not at all satisfactory in my opinion. I think that the header lines should have been dropped completely, or put in after the "<?xml " string as a comment something like this: ------------------------------------------ <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <-- report heading follows WAHOO 08 May 2008 --> <ROOT> <VOC _ID = "VOC" F1 = "F" F2 = "VOC"/> </ROOT> ------------------------------------------ Does anyone else agree with me? Ought IBM change this? What do you think? Regards, Keith ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
