Re: DTD's

[Al Snell <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

On Fri, 18 May 2001, Joel Rees (pop) wrote:

> When I take this to the next step (My boss says I must, but he isn't
> allocating me time yet.), I will use a RAD tool (Delphi, probably) to set up
> a quick form that wraps the fields I know I'll need with XML tags and
> appends it to a text file that will be well-formed when it is generated.

Not doable IIRC... to be well formed, it has to be a single top-level
element:

<timesheet>
 <item>...</item>
 <item>...</item>
</timesheet>

New items need to be inserted before the </timesheet>. YOu will either
need to process the document through a SAX filter that inserts a new
element at the appropriate moment, or write code that seeks to the end of
the file, finds the </timesheet>, writes the new element from that point,
then puts a new </timesheet> on the end...

XML isn't great for appending to, I don't think it's useful at all for a
log file (except if the log file is composed of a series of little XML
documents with a higher-level boundary marking between each).

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software