Exported XML file - how to view it?

  • Thread starter Thread starter MH
  • Start date Start date
M

MH

A simple question from a newbie: when I export an Access table as an XML
file (along with its schema file), how is that file to be viewed? A
double-click on the *.xml file opens up IE6 with a view of the xml code
itself, instead of a readable view of the data. Shouldn't one see the data
in a table format, as in an html file? I think I am missing something pretty
simple here, but I don't know what it is. A related question: does the IE6
XML viewer designed show the xml code or the end-view of the code?

Thanks,

Mark
 
Mark-
Think for a minute about what you expect of XML and IE. XML is a very
flexible language - it let's you make up your own rules!
IE6 has a basic XML/XSLT parser. Now, XML is not really anything like HTML,
and even though the recordset's schema is provided, how would IE know quite
how you wanted that data displayed? The schema has nothing to do with how
the data is displayed, it only describes the relationships between elements
in the document. ADO makes it easy to save recordsets as XML essentially for
transport, or HTML display WITH additional help. In ASP or ASP.NET you could
provide a trasformation to display the data as HTML, formated how you see
fit, but IE has no way of knowing what you want the data to look like, in
fact, IE doesn't really know that the XML is tabular data. Or, you could use
the MSXML and provide an XSLT to convert the XML recordset data into HTML
markup that will show up how you like it in a web page.
Maybe if you provide some more details on what you are trying to do the
group can help come up with more specific answers.
HTH
Ben
 
Thanks for your helpful response. I did some more digging last night:

In Access, when one exports a table in the XML type, a window pops up with
three options: 1) Data (XML), 2) Schema and 3) Presentation (XSL). The first
two are checked by default. If one continues with these two, *.xml and *.xsd
files are exported. Double clicking on the xml file brings up IE with the
code, but not a presentation of the code.

If you export with the third (XSL) file type included, FOUR files are
exported: *.xml, *.xsd, *.xsl and *.htm. Clicking on the htm file brings up
a presentation of the data - what I was looking for. I kept clicking on the
xml file, waiting for a presentation of the data. Now I understand that the
HTM file is used for that presentation, not the xml file.

Again, thanks for you help. This is interesting and I plan to keep digging
into XML.

Mark
 
Back
Top