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.
