Reading XML file and exporting onto an Access db 1

[Jayson]

Hi there,

I'm trying to build an application which basically needs to read in an XML document, extract the necessary data, and export it an an Access database, and ultimate product a Crystal Report from the info from the database.

Note, the XML document is very large and that the "wanted" data are spread out accross the nested XML tags, how do i go about grabbing only the data that i want? and then exporting those data on appropriate fields on an Access table?

Thanks for any suggestion.

 

[chiph]

Are you using C# for this?

Chip H.

 

[Jayson]

Yes, I'm using C# for this. I'm looking at .Net libraries called: XPath, XmlNodeReader, XmlDataDocument. In conjunction, these seems to do what i want, but how would I go about grabbing the elements that i want, and then inserting them onto the appropriate fields inside the Access table.

Or am I going about this the right way? Do I actually need an Access database to produce the Crystal Report in the first place?

Thanks!

 

[chiph]

OK, the general idea is to use a XmlValidatingReader object along with a XmlTextReader object to read your file a little bit at a time. For each node that gets read (and the node could one be of several different types - elements, attributes, comments, etc) you would append it to a StringBuffer (see the example for XmlValidatingReader.Read method in the .NET help).

When you saw that you got the end element node for your XML record (like </Customer>), you would then load it into a XmlDocument object via the Load method (one of it's overloads takes a String), and then use XPath queries against your document to extract the elements you're interested in, and write them to your Access database.

Chip H.