On 24 May 2000 07:20:00 -0500, Thomas Weholt wrote:

Hello,

Has anybody tried to somehow get xml-data into SQL-statements or in some other way use xml-data as datasource for insertion into tables? It shouldn`t be impossible, if we could just agree on some format or DTD to use.

I'm headed that way - I'm planning on using XML-RPC to insert table records into an SQL database. I have the client stuff written - creates the XML files with the data the way I need it. I've written an xml.sax parser to parse the table records. It works great :^) What different paths are currently available via Zope to parse my XML files for insertion into an SQL database? Currently, my sax parser identifies the database and builds a dictionary of tables, with a list of dictionaries which represent the table records to insert. Right now I have all level 1 tags representing tables with level 2 tags representing the records. Record attributes and tag levels beyond the record level are used to create the record dictionary. I'm basically using the W3C recommendations for representing a simple relational database. There might be some value in using the tags to indicate structure and the attributes to indicate data, but I'm not sure that level of complexity is needed. Seems to me that a simple well-behaved XML file could suffice. I think there is value in using specific tags and attributes to identify databases and tables, but beyond that why not just use tags to represent the data? table names are tags, their attributes, tags and and data are the record data. Since each table record needs to have a column name associated with it (to build a record dictionary), that would seem to allow only attributes and subtags (with their data), not data directly. I'm wondering why not just use attributes to describe the record data unless it's a blob or such that is easier to handle with a tag? [...]

Any thoughts? I know this could at least sort out alot of troubles I`m having right now getting data from external sources into Zope. I`m going to try and make a product or a method etc. that uses xmllib doing this, but if anybody has done it allready I`d be very happy do "abuse" their effort. :->

If the XML data isn't significantly large, I would consider leaving it as XML in the database and just query it. This looks like an excellent job for Racks and Predicates. :^)