About
PBDOM
PBDOM is the PowerBuilder implementation of the Document Object
Model (DOM), a programming interface defining the means by which XML
documents can be accessed and manipulated.
Although PBDOM is not an implementation of the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) DOM API, it is very similar. The PBDOM PowerBuilder API
can be used for reading, writing, and manipulating standard-format XML
from within PowerScript code. PBDOM portrays an XML document as a
collection of interconnected objects and provides intuitive methods
indicating the use and functionality of each object.
PBDOM is also similar to JDOM, which is a Java-based document object
model for XML files.
For information on the W3C DOM and JDOM objects and hierarchies,
refer to their respective specifications. The W3C DOM specification is
available at http://www.w3.org/DOM/. The JDOM
specification, or a link to it, is available at http://www.jdom.org/docs/.
With PBDOM, your applications can parse existing XML documents and
extract the information contained as part of a business process or in
response to an external request. Applications can also produce XML
documents that conform to the type or schema required by other
applications, processes, or systems. Existing XML documents can be read
and modified by manipulating or transforming the PBDOM tree of objects
instead of having to edit XML strings directly.
You can also build components that can produce or process XML
documents for use in multitier applications or as part of a Web
service.
Node trees
PBDOM interacts with XML documents according to a tree-view model
consisting of parent and child nodes. A document element represents the
top-level node of an XML document. Each child node of the document element
has one or many child nodes that represent the branches of the tree. Nodes
in the tree are accessible through PBDOM class methods.
XML parser
The PBDOM XML parser is used to load and parse an XML document, and
also to generate XML documents based on user-specified DOM nodes.
PBDOM provides all the methods you need to traverse the node tree,
access the nodes and attribute values (if any), insert and delete nodes,
and convert the node tree to an XML document so that it can be used by
other systems.