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On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 8:49 am, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> Is there some legal requirement to keep a full fidelity copy of the
> document? If not, I can't see why you don't just generate the XML as needed
> from the database when export is needed. Most major database products have
> had SQL<->XML mapping functionality for years.
oh yes, that's certainly the traditional way....
but if you think about it, it has to be much easier to interface together via
some sort of communications link, two accounting systems that are both based
on xml documents... than two systems that are based on quite probably two
databases of two entirely different structures. And we're not even talking
about the 50,000 plus different designs for accounting systems that are out
there.
a flow of xml documents from one system to the other has to be more slippery
going from an xml source into an xml destination than converting database
fields to xml and then back again on both sides with different mappings.
I strongly question the neccessity of accounting system designs that they can
only work when records are stored in a Indexed Sequential Access Method
system. This is what we have been taught, I know, and lived through, but now,
I think the times have changed.
If we go back to 1990 or so, everybody was writing their Sales Order Entry
program...
We had our Header and Line items file... that was the way we did it back
then....
but it was a workaround because we couldn't store our Sales Order in one
place. With XPath/XML, now we finally can do something like....:
// -- Header fields
myDoc := XMLDOC.Create();
myDoc.Document_Reference := GetNextSalesOrderNumber();
myDoc.Document_Date := Today;
myDoc.Debtor_Account_number := 3994
// -- Line item fields
myDoc.SetStringElement('/Line Items[$lineno]/product_code','4055');
myDoc.SetStringElement('/Line Items[$lineno]/description','Memory chip');
myDoc.SetIntegerElement('/Line Items[$lineno]/quantity',1);
myDoc.SetCurrencyElement('/Line Items[$lineno]/product_code',49.95);
myDoc.Save;
We never could do anything like this in those days.... now we can..
so I ask, why do we really even need to have traditional accounting system
designs based on ISAM ? what value do they really add? when xml designs for
accounting systems seem to make so much more sense?
and if we can have our accounting systems running on xml, it shouldn't be to
hard to get somebody in bangalore to write us the .send() function. I'm sure
they can do it for us :-)
Regards
David
--
Computergrid : The ones with the most connections win.
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