XML Extensions for RM/COBOL is Liant Software Corporation's facility that allows RM/COBOL applications to access eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents. XML is the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web. Adding structure to documents facilitates searching, sorting, or any one of a variety of operations that can be performed on an electronic document.

XML Extensions has many capabilities. The major features support the ability to import and export XML documents to and from COBOL working storage. Specifically, XML Extensions allows data to be imported from an XML document by converting data elements (as necessary) and storing the results into a matching COBOL data structure. Similarly, data is exported from a COBOL data structure by converting the COBOL data elements (as necessary) and storing the results in an XML document.

Version 2 of XML Extensions for RM/COBOL runs on Microsoft Windows 32-bit operating systems and selected UNIX platforms. XML Extensions requires RM/COBOL version 8 or later.

Version 2 of XML Extensions for RM/COBOL contains the following enhancements:

• Support for UNIX. The XML Extensions is currently available for selected UNIX platforms, including AIX, HP-UX, Linux, SCO OpenServer, Sun Solaris, and UnixWare.
• Document Type Definition Support. Exporting of XML documents has been enhanced to include the ability to specify a document type definition, which defines the legal building blocks of an XML document. A DTD can be used to define entity names that are referred to by the values of FILLER data items in the COBOL data structure being exported.
• Anonymous COBOL Data Structures. The acts of exporting and importing of documents have been improved so that an anonymous COBOL data structure can be used. An anonymous COBOL data structure is any data area that is the same size or larger than the data structure indicated by the template file. This means that exporting from and importing to a Linkage Section data item, which is either based on an argument passed to a called program or a pointer set by the SET statement (for example, into allocated memory), is now possible. This same capability is also true for an external data item.
• Relaxed Time Stamp Checking. It is no longer necessary for the compilation time stamp in the object program to match the cobtoxml time stamp in the template file. That is, the program may be recompiled without running the cobtoxml utility. It is necessary to run cobtoxml only when the relevant data structure(s) are changed.
• UTF-8 Data Encoding. Support has been added to both the UNIX and Windows implementations of XML Extensions to allow the in-memory representation of element content to use UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 is a format for representing Unicode. This may be useful for COBOL applications that wish to pass UTF-8 encoded data to other processes. XML documents are normally encoded using Unicode. XML Extensions for RM/COBOL always generates UTF-8 data.
• New XML Statement. A new XML statement, XML SET ENCODING, has been added to XML Extensions that allows the developer to switch between the local character encoding (which is system-dependent) and the UTF-8 encoding format.