XML-INTO and boolean variable

[zukes1966]

I use XML-INTO for parsing

<val>true</val>

element into structure

dcl-ds q Qualified;
  val ind;
end-ds;

In g.val field I found "t" value.

It seems XML-INTO parsing <val> element as a string.

Is any way to force conversion to IND type?

[JonBoy]

Simple answer - No.

Unlike json XML does not have a predefined meaning for the string "true". So the parser does not offer a translation option. Just change the definition to char(5) - I'm assuming "false" is also an option - and then test/set an indicator yourself.

[B.Hauser]

Simple answer - No.

Unlike json XML does not have a predefined meaning for the string "true". So the parser does not offer a translation option. Just change the definition to char(5) - I'm assuming "false" is also an option - and then test/set an indicator yourself.

... at least if you working with XML-INTO and not with (embedded) SQL!
In the following example true/false in an XML-Document is converted into Boolean;

Select x.*, Integer(MyBoolBoolean) as MyBoolInteger
  from XMLTABLE('/rowset/row'
         Passing XMLParse(Document
                    '<rowset>
                        <row><MYID>1</MYID><MYBOOLEAN1>false</MYBOOLEAN1><MYBOOLEAN2>false</MYBOOLEAN2></row>
                        <row><MYID>3</MYID><MYBOOLEAN1>true</MYBOOLEAN1><MYBOOLEAN2>true</MYBOOLEAN2></row>
                    </rowset>')
         Columns MyId Integer,
                 MyBoolVarChar     VarChar(5)                Path 'MYBOOLEAN1',
                 MyBoolVarGraphic  VarGraphic(5) CCSID 1200  Path 'MYBOOLEAN1',
                 MyBoolBoolean     Boolean                   Path 'MYBOOLEAN1') x;  ​

[zukes1966]

So, this means that XML-INTO has no boolean(true,false)->ind translation implemented .

[JonBoy]

Correct - XML-INTO does not look at the XSD specification for the file and so has no idea that what it sees as a simple character string is implementing a boolean. Remember that with XSDs you can basically create any data type you want - so there's really no more reason for it to handle this than any other "made up" data type.

[zukes1966]

XML-INTO sees true/false in source data and boolean as target variable. In fact, IBM may have doubts about translation when building a function XML-INTO

[JonBoy]

XML-INTO does exactly what it is supposed to do and does it, in my opinion, correctly. As I noted - it does not process the XSD and so has no way of knowing that the word "true" should be mapped to a boolean. Just process it as character there is no advantage to being able to treeat it as an indicator.

[Scott Klement]

FWIW -- if you don't like the way XML-INTO works, you can write a DATA-INTO handler to process XML, and it can convert "true" to *ON and "false" to *OFF if you want it to.