Before you can parse an XML document with an XML PARSE statement, you must make the document available to your program. Common methods of acquiring the document are by retrieval from a WebSphere MQ message, a CICS transient queue or communication area, or an IMS message processing queue; or by reading the XML document from a file.
If the XML document that you want to parse is held in a file, use ordinary COBOL facilities to place the document into a data item in your program:
When the XMLPARSE(XMLSS) option is in effect, you can parse XML documents from a file by passing the parser one record (or segment) of text at a time. This capability is useful for parsing very large XML documents or XML documents that reside in a data set.
related references
Parsing XML documents one segment at a time
XMLPARSE