Represent a DOM node in ABL

In essence, X-document represents the collection of nodes, their content of the nodes, and all the relationships between nodes.

The X-noderef object is an ABL object that is a reference to any node in a DOM tree (except a DOCUMENT node, which is the X-document). In ABL, you can create a handle to an X-noderef object, which in turn is a cursor pointing to a DOM node in a DOM tree (represented by an ABL X-document object).

The life cycle of an X-noderef object is similar to the X-document object's. For example:

DEFINE VARIABLE hNode AS HANDLE NO-UNDO.
CREATE X-NODEREF hNode.
. . .
DELETE OBJECT hNode.

There are many types of DOM nodes as identified by the SUBTYPE attribute of both the X-document and X-noderef objects. Some types of nodes may have child nodes of various types, and others are leaf nodes that cannot have anything below them in the document structure.

The ABL X-noderef object can be one of the following DOM node types, as indicated by the SUBTYPE attribute:

• ATTRIBUTE
• CDATA-SECTION
• COMMENT
• DOCUMENT-FRAGMENT
• ELEMENT
• ENTITY-REFERENCE
• PROCESSING-INSTRUCTION
• TEXT

The default subtype is ELEMENT.

The following table shows X-noderef object SUBTYPE values, and how the NAME and NODE-VALUE attributes are different based on SUBTYPE.

ATTRIBUTE

DOCUMENT-FRAGMENT

ELEMENT

ENTITY-REFERENCE

TEXT

CDATA-SECTION

COMMENT

PROCESSING-INSTRUCTION