Ted Byers schrieb:
May I ask a question about this?
I will be working on an older database in which the original developer
stored XML documents as a single variable length text field. To process
it, it has to be retrieved in full and parsed. But the structure of it
is simple in that it has an element for each field in the DB that
replaced the earily version. But people are still using the earlier one
because they still need access to the old data and no tool has yet been
written by my predecessors to move the old data over to the new DB.
Does the XML support you're all talking about make it less tedious to
develop tools to parse these old XML files and put their data into the
right field of the right table? I can develop the tool our users need
using the resources I have at hand, but the proces of parsing these XML
files is certain to be very tedious; something I am not looking forward
to. There is a reason I don't do much with XML even though I know how.
Hm. well if my mind does not fool me you wrote the exact posting
sometime ago ;)
and I also remember answers in the region of parsing it with a stored
function and for your legacy application put a view.
Otoh, if you want it "smarter" and "nicer" you could write a whole
datatype with default input/output is your plain XML text.
However - since XML is very generic you cannot expect some standards
implementation to cover all _your_ needs. I would just use a dom
or sax parser in my favourite scripting language and distribute
the items over some tables as dom nodes and out the whole logic
into a custom datatype.
Regards
Tino
