Progress
External Program
Interfaces


About SAX

The Simple API for XML (SAX) is an application programming interface (API) for XML documents. It defines the way an XML document is accessed and manipulated. In the SAX specification, the term “document” is used in the broad sense to include many different kinds of information that might be stored in diverse systems. Much of this would traditionally be seen as data rather than as documents. Nevertheless, XML presents this data as documents, and SAX lets you manage them.

When an XML document is accessed by a SAX application, as the XML parser encounters an XML element, it parses that element and provides its information to the application immediately, through a callback (explained in the "Progress SAX Callbacks" section and defined in the "SAX Callback Reference" section of this book). This contrasts with the Document Object Model (DOM), which requires the entire XML document to be loaded before information on the document’s XML elements is provided.

Note On SAX Compatibility With the Progress 4GL

The SAX API is designed to be compatible with a wide range of programming languages. For the most part, Progress has followed the SAX Java API naming conventions. In a very few cases, Progress Software Corporation (PSC) elected to use the familiar names already used in the 4GL rather than the names given in the SAX specification. Similarly, where there are existing 4GL features that provide the same capability as the SAX interfaces, PSC has chosen to use the 4GL implementation rather than introduce new language features that match SAX more closely.


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