Hi Nancy,
As Caroline points out, I've been working exporting data into XML but not necessarily table structure. However, I don't think that will be radically different from what I've been doing.
The data structure for the type of data I'm extracting are very specific and rather cumbersome, so I had a bit of problems to creating XML documents by hand, that is using strings to generate XML. At one time I got really lost in the process so I decided to use tDOM instead.
tDOM is very cool as it allows you to generate XML straight from a list, which is rather nice if you are dealing with complex data structures. There's an excellent posting on the tDOM website about creating XML documents that it was really helpful:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tdom/message/423
For what I've been doing, I have set up a set of functions that help me contruct a large XML document very easily. For instance:
ad_proc -public createManifest {
{-identifier ""}
{-version ""}
} {
Creates an IMS manifest
@param identifier Manifest identifier
@param version manifest version
} {
set doc [dom createDocument manifest]
set manifest [$doc documentElement]
if {![empty_string_p $identifier]} {
$manifest setAttribute identifier $identifier
}
if {![empty_string_p $version]} {
$manifest setAttribute version $version
}
return $manifest
}
ad_proc -public addOrganizations {
{-parent:required}
{-default ""}
} {
Creates an organizations
@param parent parent node
@param default default identifier
} {
set organizations [$parent appendChild [[$parent ownerDocument] createElement organizations]]
if {![empty_string_p $default]} {
$organizations setAttribute default $default
}
return $organizations
}
So when I have to create a manifest file (an XML file that contains information and structure about a course), I call the createManifest function passing an identifier and a version, then it returns the tDOM node that I use to insert childnodes to (example using addOrganizations -parent #theManifestnode# ...).
Once you are done creating your XML doc, you can save it to a file or return it to a browser by doing:
ns_return 200 text/xml [$manifest asXML -indent 2 -escapeNonASCII]
(In this case, it returns it as to a browser). $manifest is the manifestsnode.
I hope that helps,
Ernie
