Oracle Forms - Creating XML files

Creating XML files

To create XML files, we need three parts of the Oracle Developer Suite. All of these parts come with a normal 10g or 9i installation of the Developer Suite. These three parts are the Forms Builder, the Reports Builder, and the Forms2XML conversion tool.

The Forms2XML conversion tool is the most extensive to understand and is used to create XML files from Form modules, Object Libraries, and Forms Menus. So, we will first discuss the possibilities of this tool.

The Forms2XML conversion tool

This tool can be used both from the command line as well as a Java applet. As the command line gives us all the possibilities we need and is as easy as a Java applet, we will only use the command-line possibilities. The frmf2xml command comes with some options. The following syntax is used while converting the Forms Modules, the Object Libraries, and the Forms Menus to an XML structure: frmf2xml [option] file [file]

In other words, we follow these steps:

1. We first type frmf2xml.
2. Alternatively, we give one of the options with it.
3. We tell the command which file we want to convert, and we have the option to address more than one file for the conversion to XML.

We probably want to give the OVERWRITE=YES option with our command. This property ensures that the newly created XML file will overwrite the one with the same name in the directory where we are working. If another file with the same name already exists in this directory and we don't give the OVERWRITE option the value YES (the default is NO), the file will not be generated, as we see in the following screenshot:

If there are any images used in modules (Forms or Object Libraries), the Forms2XML tool will refer to the image in the XML file created, and that file will create a TIF file of the image in the directory.

The XML files that are created will be stored in the same directory from which we call the command. It will use the following syntax for the name of the XML file:

• formname.fmb will become formname_fmb.xml
• libraryname.olb will become libraryname_olb.xml
• menuname.mmb will become menuname_mmb.xml