Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

In the first three parts of this series, I focused on the basics of using RPG’s XML-INTO. In this episode I want to wrap things up by covering two of the more recent additions to this support.

Let’s start with namespaces. I haven’t got time to go into all the whys and wherefores of namespaces. For now let’s just say that they allow you avoid name collisions by qualifying element and attribute names. Since you will encounter them in many documents it is important to understand the

Great technique shared! Function overloading is a real boon to SQL programming. Here’s another way that requires less code and is less invasive (i.e., you won’t have to recompile anything.)

Leave your original FMTDATE function alone and add the following to the SQL source:

create function xxx/fmtdate
(inDate varchar(8), inFromFmt varchar(8), inToFmt varchar(8))
returns varchar(10)
language SQL
specific FMTDATEA
deterministic
returns null on null input

begin
 declare DateNum numeric (8,0);
 declare OutDate varchar(10);
 set DateNum = decimal(inDate);
 set OutDate = FmtDate(DateNum, inFromFmt, inToFmt);
 return OutDate;
end

I’ve used this technique to overload many user-defined functions and keep the HLL programming

Imagine a character database field that stores a phone number. No formatting rules are involved, so the values in the column vary such as 8370155738, 837/015-5738, 837-015.5738, etc. We’d like to write an RPG program that allows the user to enter a number, formatted or not, onto the screen and if that string of numbers is found in the table’s phone column, show it to the user. Is there a way to use SQL to strip the non-numeric characters from the phone field, and select the record if the result matches the user input?

–Brad

Hi, Brad.

Scrubbing data is