CARRAY

Character array type is a collection of characters that is handled opaquely:

Data that will not be interpreted by the BEA Tuxedo system and for which data-dependent routing, encoding, or decoding is not required.

STRING

A set of non-null characters ending with a null character. The data type is character and the length is determined by counting characters in the buffer until reaching the null character. No subtype is specified.

C programs

FML

Field Manipulation Language (FML) is a data structure that stores tagged values. Values are typed, may be specified more than once, and vary in length.

The FML buffer is an abstract data type used in operations to create, modify, delete, or access fields. In your program, you access or update a field in the fielded buffer by referencing the identifier, and the FML function provides for a run-time translation of the field's location and data type, and performs the operation.

One interface to FML uses 16 bits (FML16) for field identifiers and lengths of fields; the other uses 32 bits (FML32).

The functionality of the two interfaces is identical. The power of FML is in its flexibility. The size of the buffer can vary, depending on the needs of the application for each message. Character fields may also vary in length, so wasted space is avoided.

Fielded buffers offer data independence to the application. When writing an application, you do not need to know how or where the data is stored within a fielded buffer. FML provides associative field access, so you simply specify a field by name and its value is returned. FML also contains conversion functions, so that you can store or retrieve a field in a particular data format, regardless of the underlying storage type.

FML buffers also support storage of more than one value for a field. The variable length format of fielded buffers allows for multiple field occurrences to be stored and retrieved.

Fielded buffers provide a convenient way to transfer a collection of fields, perhaps different with each message, from a client to a server and back, or to store fields in an application queue. We recommend using FML, particularly if the interface between clients and servers may change.

VIEW

A VIEW is simply a C structure or a COBOL record that has an associated definition of which fields and their types appear in the record in which order. This buffer is used for fixed collections of data elements, or structures or records; its subtype is used to specify the record format name.

VIEW records are flat data structures. They do not support structures within other structures, nor do they allow arrays of structures or pointers. They support integral data types such as long integer, character, and decimal.

VIEWS are provided as a way to use C structures and COBOL records with the BEA Tuxedo system. The BEA Tuxedo run-time system understands the record format based on the view description read at run time. When allocating a VIEW, your application specifies a buffer type of VIEW and a subtype that matches the name of the view. The run-time system can do the following:

C structures and COBOL records used with a BEA Tuxedo application

XML (Extensible Markup Language)

XML buffers enable BEA Tuxedo applications to use XML for exchanging data within and between applications. BEA Tuxedo applications can send and receive simple XML buffers, and route those buffers to the appropriate servers. All logic for dealing with the XML documents, including parsing, resides in the application. An XML document consists of: a sequence of characters that encode the text of a document and a logical structure of the document and meta-information related to the structure.

The XML parser in the BEA Tuxedo system performs autodetection of character encodings, character code conversion, detection of element content and attribute values, and data type conversion.

Data-dependent routing is supported for XML buffers.