export XML from Unidata

Thought it might be worthwhile to post here also something I recently posted in a Datatel forum, about how to export XML from Unidata.  This is part of our institutions ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) process, in which we transfer data from our transactional system (Datatel’s Colleague) to an operational reporting database (in Microsoft SQL Server 2005).

Here are the basics on how to export XML from Unidata (7.1):

1. Change to your production Colleague folder, i.e., cd /datatel/coll18/live/apphome

2. Create the _XML_ folder inside your production Colleague folder, i.e., /usr/ud71/bin/udt CREATE.FILE DIR _XML_

3. Create XML map, if desired (i.e., if you want to replace dots with underscores in Colleague field names). This will need to be in _XML_ folder when you dump to XML. Here is a sample file:
<?XML version=”1.0″?>
<U2xml-mapping xmlns:U2xml=”http://www.ibm.com/U2-xml“>
<U2xml:mapping file=”COUNTIES”
record=”COUNTIES_rec”
/>
<U2xml:mapping file=”COUNTIES”
field=”COUNTIES.ID”
map-to=”COUNTIES_ID”
/>
<U2xml:mapping file=”COUNTIES”
field=”CNTY.DESC”
map-to=”CNTY_DESC”
/>
</U2xml-mapping>

4. Run the Unidata command to LIST to XML, i.e,
/usr/ud71/bin/udt LIST COUNTIES COUNTIES.ID CNTY.DESC TO COUNTIES TOXML XMLMAPPING COUNTIES.txt
XMLMAPPING uses the map COUNTIES.txt, in this case. TO COUNTIES TOXML creates a file COUNTIES.xml in the _XML_ folder you created above.

I found the documentation for this on IBMs website, Unidata manual called ‘Using Uniquery’, chapter 9, ‘Creating XML Documents’

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