Local XML Application

  • Thread starter Thread starter Butt Chin Chuan
  • Start date Start date
B

Butt Chin Chuan

I'm facing a difficult decision which I would like to ask
for some opinion. I want to develop a directory which will
allow the users (from my faculty) to access the the server
database to display out details such as name, ic, address
number, contact number etc. For internal use, I use SQL
2000 and SQL CE.

Now, I would like (well, 'forced' would be a more likely
term here) to access the corresponding information from
other faculties. The problem is, their database type
(Oracle, MySql etc) is unknown and I have no experience
with XML. My questions are:
(1) Can XML solved this problems? If so, how?
(2) Can XML be used as a local database?
(3) Can XML extract and format the data according to my
format in the programming logic without knowing the way
they save the data?

I've just got this feedback where I need to cater to the
situation above. Unfortunately, I am not sure of the
issues at hand with XML capabilities. Question (3) is
really a challenge for me. How can I know what to extract
from their (other faculty) files to be formatted to my
application to use? Can anyone please help? Thank you.
 
XML or no XML in your particular case is not a problem...
Welcome to the "enterprize style" application development
with requirements to make your system work with the
different databases, systems or OS's. If I where you, I'd
stick with MS SQL 2000 as a central place for holding and
maintaining data and would load the data into MS SQL 2000
from the other different sources. You will have to create
a "interface" (agreement) that all other data sources
would make the data available for you - and XML could come
into play as a standard format in exchanging the data. If
the data is more or less static you could create a daily
batch jobs that'd load this data into approriate tables on
your server...

HTH... Alex
 
It sounds like you are looking for a common 'language' that can
communicate to various systems. XML is good for this, simply because
it is generic and easily translatable. The only problems would be
differences in the database structures.

On a CE note. XML is terribly slow and cumbersome. Personally I use
XML for my data transfer between applications over a network, however
I created my own XML Parser that quickly reads the data from the XML
document and stores it in the necessary structures within my project.
Using XML is great, using on CE however is something to thing twice
about.

Rayogen
 
What do you mean by an "agreement"? Anyway, since I would like to know
about XML in more detail before I decide on my next course of action,
can you please inform me where to get a good tutorial in XML on the
Internet?

Also, even XML is capable of getting information from other databases
(Oracle, MySql etc), I think that I as the developer still needs to know
what and how data is being saved in the other databases before I can use
them, right? What I mean is, if I want to display say, name, ic,
birthdate, contact number and email, and the other databases only
contains name and email, I still can't get what I want (at least
partially). This is especially true (at least I think so, please correct
me if I'm wrong) that the name of the columns which represents the data
(name, ic etc).

My lecturer suggested that I should try to build the application in a
way which it can interfaces with multiple (different) types of
databases. Even if I learned XML, which I am trying now, I still can't
see how I can extract the information correctly without knowing how the
data is represented in the other databases. I mean, can you (or anyone
for that matter) just use XML, access my database, parse it in XML and
just get it into the application to be used as data? It will at least
need to regconize which data represents what (eg: in your database, the
field for name maybe "name", but for mine might be "NameOfLecturer"). If
that is possible, can anyone please point me to the tutorial that shows
me how to do this?

Thank you very much. I know I have asked quite a lot here, but I'm
confused (don't know is more appropriate to describe me) to the
capabilities of XML and how it functions. Please comment.

Butt Chin Chuan
A beginner in .Net Compact Framework development
 
Back
Top