XML in COBOL with nested tables and varying children

Question

Is it possible to use XML GENERATE to create XML with multi-level nested elements of different sizes?

For example:

01  SOURCE-REC.
    05  REPEATING-PARENT OCCURS 5 TIMES.
        10  PARENT-NAME PIC X(7).
        10  CHILD-COUNT PIC 9.
        10  REPEATING-CHILD OCCURS 1 TO 5 TIMES
                DEPENDING ON CHILD-COUNT.
            15  CHILD-NAME PIC X(6).

Compiling this using Enterprise Cobol v4.1 yields:

IGYGR1263-S "OCCURS DEPENDING ON" object "CHILD-COUNT" was defined as a table element. The "DEPENDING ON" phrase was discarded.

IGYGR1116-S The "DEPENDING ON" object for table "REPEATING-CHILD" was invalid. The "DEPENDING ON" phrase was discarded.

Not all parents are going to have the same number of children. How can this be addressed?

Edit: I suppose at its heart, this isn't really an XML question. I hit a wall just trying to build the working storage that I later hope to feed into XML GENERATE.

Answer 1

I think you should lose the DEPENDING ON altogether. It doesn't save memory, and you can just as easily address valid REPEATING-CHILD items by making sure their subscripts are in the range from 1 to the corresponding CHILD-COUNTER.