XML Server Getting Started    

Part 3 XMLControl and DW2Java 

Introduction 

XMLControl  is the most powerful control in the XMLSP suite. It is extremely useful  for data entry and reporting; it can be 

also used as a data storage for various business objects and XMLSP control as well    Treeviews, Menus, Graphs  can be all 

populated with XMLControl data. DW2Java is the supplementary technology technology that allows automatic conversion of 

PowerBuilder DataWindows into XMLControl compliant data source objects. 

XMLControl dataSources 

XML Control 

dataSource

 is a base name for a set of J2EE application server objects which together support the functionality 

described in the traditional PowerBuilder's dataobject or Visual Basic Grid control. As a reminder, a PB dataobject is a 

metadata to be interpreted by PB run time. It defines how result set is mapped to the database, what it should look like on 

screen, what computations, filtering and sorting does it have to go through prior to be displayed.   

XMLSP software has its own metadata format. However, XMLSP does not rely on any interpreting engine to  enforce  the 

metadata.  Instead, XMLSP software generates several J2EE server side objects per metadata file: one Java Server Page or 

servlet to return requested database data in XML format, one XSL stylesheet to format XML data for browser rendering, one 

JavaScript file to support client side computations of conditional attributes, totals and other aggregations, etc. These objects, 

lso known as 

dataSource

 objects have life of their own   in any J2EE server. 

Metadata of any original PB dataobject can be automatically converted to XMLSP format during DW2Java conversion 

described below. By the same token conversion utility DW2Java automatically generates and deploys all 

dataSource

 objects 

in a J2EE server, given PSR of a particular DataWindow. The following is the logical flow of the DW2Java conversion: 

Generating XMLControl dataSource from PowerBuilder DataWindow object 

XMLSP include special utility   DW2JavaPro   which performs batch conversion of arbitrary set of dataobjects out of 

selected PowerBuilder PBL files. Users pick desired characted encoding, generation template and layout per each 

datawindow or accept the project defaults as it is shown in the following illustration: 

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