Understanding XML Output for Info*Engine Groups
Info*Engine maintains all generated groups as serializable Java objects. These objects can be easily manipulated by custom Java applications, JSP pages, and tasks. Then, when there is a request to display a group, Info*Engine generates an XML document containing the group.
By default, the Info*Engine generated XML document contains the following parts:
• The document declaration at the beginning of the document.
• The wc:COLLECTION element, which is the document root for all Info*Engine generated XML documents.
• The root group element, which is named through the CLASS parameter on webjects that produce output groups. For example, if the CLASS parameter is set to “Employees,” then the root group element start tag includes <Employees>. In addition to the element name, the group element start tag always includes the NAME attribute. The value of the NAME attribute comes from the group name specified on the GROUP_OUT parameter of the webject that created the group.
• The wc:INSTANCE elements, which identify Info*Engine objects (rows) within a group. Each Info*Engine object contains attributes that are coded as sub-elements of a wc:INSTANCE element.
These parts are described in detail in the following sections. For examples of Info*Engine XML output, see the example XML tasks documented in
Group Webjects.
In addition, Info*Engine can also generate XML output that includes the metadata that is part of the group, element, or attribute data.