The SAX-writer is an ABL object created with the CREATE SAX-WRITER statement and accessed through a SAX-writer object handle. A collection of attributes and methods on the handle allow you to configure options and stream the XML content element by element to a variety of output destinations. When your application finishes streaming the XML document, delete the SAX-writer object.

Writing XML with a SAX-writer object is an alternative to outputting the DOM document tree of an X-document object. The DOM document tree needs to be completely built and stored in memory before you can output it. In contrast, the SAX-writer object only needs enough memory to handle the largest single element in your XML output. The streaming nature of the SAX-writer object makes it a better choice for writing large XML documents.

The following table summarizes the attributes and methods of the SAX-writer object.

Table 1. SAX-writer attributes and methods
Attribute or Method Description
ENCODING attribute Returns the name of the character encoding used to encode the contents of an XML document (for example, UTF-8, UTF-16, ASCII, and so on). The values must match the standard IANA encoding values.
FORMATTED attribute Determines whether the XML output has extra formatting to make it a human-readable document.
FRAGMENT attribute Specifies if the output of a SAX-writer object is a complete document or a fragment.
STANDALONE attribute Determines the value of the standalone attribute in the XML declaration.
STRICT attribute Determines if the SAX-writer object should ensure that the XML document is well formed XML.
VERSION attribute Determines the value of the version string in the XML declaration.
WRITE-STATUS attribute The current state of an XML write in a SAX-writer object. Certain method calls are only valid with certain status values.
DECLARE-NAMESPACE( ) method Adds a namespace declaration to an XML element.
END-DOCUMENT( ) method Closes the XML document.
END-ELEMENT( ) method Ends an XML element based upon the specified element name.
INSERT-ATTRIBUTE( ) method Adds a single attribute to a start tag in an XML element.
RESET( ) method Closes the open stream and resets the SAX-writer object to its default values.
SET-OUTPUT-DESTINATION( ) method Defines the target of the XML document that the SAX-writer object creates.
START-DOCUMENT( ) method Creates the XML document with the prolog information.
START-ELEMENT( ) method Starts an XML element based upon the specified name.
WRITE-CDATA( ) method Adds a CDATA block to an XML element.
WRITE-CHARACTERS( ) method Adds character data to an XML element.
WRITE-COMMENT( ) method Adds a comment to the XML document.
WRITE-DATA-ELEMENT( ) method Adds a complete XML element.
WRITE-EMPTY-ELEMENT( ) method

Creates an empty XML element.
WRITE-EXTERNAL-DTD( ) method Adds an external Document Type Definition (DTD) reference to an XML document.
WRITE-ENTITY-REF( ) method Adds an entity reference to the XML stream.
WRITE-FRAGMENT( ) method

Adds character data to the XML element.
WRITE-PROCESSING-INSTRUCTION( ) method Creates a processing instruction node in an XML document.