D10.2 Ideas/Thoughts on a project...

[RTollison 0]

i have a project that i am in the beginning stages of.
I have a dll that can do Merge Fields for RTF documents (devexpress).
now i am working on getting data to the dll in question.
My calling program will have to send the merge data in an XML format, format not determined just yet.
in my dll what would be a good simple way to load the data up into whatever so i can run the merge function of the richeditcontroller.
needs a datasource and a dataset.
how to get the xml information into a dataset/datasource object?
Just looking for ideas/pitfalls/whatever in getting xml data into dataset, anything is on the table since i haven't started yet.

[Jacek Laskowski 57]

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Rio/en/FireDAC.Comp.DataSet.TFDDataSet.SaveToStream

[RTollison 0]

Thanks for pointer, but is there any documentation as to what all the table/column header fields mean.

MinimumCapacity="50"

Name="FDMemTable1"

how do i know what is variable and its meaning versus a fixed value and possibly its meaning?

[Jacek Laskowski 57]

I don't think there is a specification of this format anywhere described (I haven't met it).
But from what I understood you want to write data to XML in order to read them in the DLL, so why do you need to know the format?
If you want to have XML for another purpose then you can create it yourself using any XML library.

[RTollison 0]

I am having to create the xml file using cobol program. I am creating the file to do mail merge in the dll. 
so far by using the same values in the xml file it seems to be working but I am testing on a small number of records < 20 

just concerned if it goes to 2000 or so 

[Jacek Laskowski 57]

Then you may want to consider creating a mailing queue based on e.g. pipes (or tcp/ip). So the DLL would be a server reading the queue/pipe, and the application in the Cobol would work as a client? I don't know what possibilities Cobol has and if it supports pipes api.

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/ipc/pipes

[RTollison 0]

no cobol doesn't have native support for that, i would have to create a dll for the communications.

i am ok with creating the xml and experimenting/adjusting as needed.

 

Funny part is where i saw a forum on here talking about the death of Cobol by some specific time frame. My employer has been using it since 1985 and we have over 1,200+ customers who use it and are happy with the applications.

Edited November 21, 2019 by RTollison