Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Additional Data Types

The data types that come to my mind first are real legacy types associated with IBM mainframes. For example, if we had alphanumeric fields in EBCDIC rather than ASCII encoding, and would want to do EBCDIC to ASCII conversion. If we did this we would probably also need to support the associated numeric data types such as zoned decimal and packed decimal. There might be a few wrinkles we would have to consider in regard to specifying and retrieving record tags. However, for the most part we again would need to code only the DataCell derived classes, change the RecordHandler's createDataCell method, and add the enumerations for the data types to the BBCommonFileDescription.xsd schema.