In Rational® Developer for System z® V7.6 the Enterprise Service Tools component contains the following new features:
A new set of projects, wizards and batch processor options provides the ability to generate artifacts that enable XMLTRANSFORM resources in CICS TS 4.1 runtime.
For COBOL and PL/I interpretive scenarios, the functionality is the same as with CICS XML Assistants tool introduced in CICS TS V4.1. For compiled (Vendor) conversion in a bottom-up scenario, this new feature generates appropriate COBOL converters. The resources generated by this feature can then be used in the new CICS EXEC TRANSFORM XMLTODATA and DATATOXML.
This feature adds wizard and batch processor options that allow users to generate WSBind with the new WSBind parameters introduced in CICS TS 4.1. In previous versions of IBM® Rational Developer for System z, it was possible to create a Web service provider from a language structure with one container only, usually DFHWS-DATA. CICS Transaction Server V 4.1 introduced capability to create a Web service provider from an application that uses many containers on a channel.
The new option DATETIME provides additional mapping for XML elements of xsd:dateTime type and CICS ASKTIME format. The new option DATA-TRUNCATION adds more flexibility to how truncated data is treated by the CICS native conversion mechanism.
The user can start with a WSDL document that defines an existing Web service and create a new application from it that implements some or all of the functionality described in the Web service definition. To assist the user in writing the new PL/I application, the tool generates a template PL/I program code for either a new Web service provider or a new Web service consumer. This program uses language structures that correspond to the message elements for each operation to process requests and issue replies.
operation-->input-->message-->part-->element
Where element is an XML Schema type.
MTOM (Message Transformation Optimization Mechanism) is an abstract specification that describes, amongst other things, a technique to optimize SOAP messages where binary objects are used to carry data instead of the typical XML payload. XOP (XML-binary Optimization Package) describes how those binary objects, which were attached using MTOM, can be represented in binary octets instead of base64.
Using MTOM/XOP, a Web service requester and provider can exchange request and response language structures in binary format without having to use an intermediate XML representation. While SOAP messages are still used in this configuration, the body of the messages is very brief, essentially containing a single XML element that references a binary attachment. To enable a CICS application as an MTOM/XOP Web service, specify the scenario Create New MTOM/XOP Service Interface when creating a new Web services for CICS single-service project.
The Enterprise Service Tools single-service projects mapping editor and COBOL XML converter code generators now support the mapping of XML attributes to language structure members. Using this support, it is now possible to parse and generate XML documents that contain both XML elements and XML attributes. Having the ability to convert XML attributes is important because of the common practice for XML Schema authors to define XML documents that employ a mixture of XML elements and XML attributes to hold instance data. To indicate that both XML elements and XML attributes are supported, the mapping editor now decorates elements and attributes with appropriate icons.