Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Group Fields

Many legacy applications have what is similar to a GROUP field in COBOL, that is, a structure of two or more fields grouped together that may repeat. To support these with the current implementation each member field of each group must be specifically defined in the file description documents. Doing this loses any notion of a group. Supporting this type of functionality is fairly low on my priority list, but it could be accomplished using a strategy similar to how we'll handle composite data structures in EDI in Chapter 9.