Help please!! Sorting new data in an XML doc

[andre2]

I really hope someone can help me, because I've posted this to 4 forums with no avail.

I'm using an ASP script with the Microsoft XML DOM to append HTML form data to an XML document.

I am using this as a news submitting system for my website. The problem is this - new entries, which are contained in the element <news> are appended to the bottom of the XML file, with older entries on top.
Obviously, it doesn't make sense for a user looking for news to scroll down to the bottom of the page to get the newest news! ;-) So how would I tell the script to insert new <news> entries at top above older <news> entries?

 

[chiph]

XML usually doesn't care about the order of the elements in a document (those that are siblings). You probably can't do this. Unless you were to add a sequence number to each element (as an attribute, perhaps?), and sort the elements before displaying them.

Chip H.

 

[innmedia]

You probably have to re-create the entire XML document, first sorting the data in array or such.

 

[Guest_imported]

by applying an XSL stylesheet you can order the nodes using the order-by attribute in the for-each...
ex.

If this is the XML
<?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot;?>
<root>
<childNode>
<firstName>Bob</firstName>
</childNode>
<childNode>
<firstName>Tony</firstName>
</childNode>
</root>

The xsl would contain
<xsl:for-each select=&quot;root/childNode&quot; order-by=&quot;firstName&quot;>

it defaults to Decending order but you can change the path by adding a + or - (ie. -firstName, +firstName)

When you get into dates it's a little more ugly due to the fact that xml in it's raw form is text only... there really are no data types. Microsoft has created a data definition file for defining datatypes. so the xml file would change to <firstName dt:dt=&quot;string&quot;>Bob</firstName> or in the case of your news <date dt:dt=&quot;dateTime&quot;>2000-01-29T12:00:00</date>

That is the format XML understands as a date if you were to use the MS data type format... go to msdn.microsoft.com and search on dt:dt you should find everything you need.

-B