seeking special XML viewer

[redss]

I want to find out how to display a database log file in xml using a "tree view" like you see in windows explorer.

For example, I want to write a database log file so that when I view it, it looks like this:

processing file...
  + adding employee "bob"
  + adding employee "dave"
done processing

Then if I know that "bob" wasnt sucessfully added, I can expand the "bob" node by clicking on the +, and see the steps it went thru, the SQL, etc (like this

  + adding employee "bob"
    - get information
        + get address
        - get birthday
            - query: select date from birthday where name = 'bob'
            - ERROR: query retrieved 0 rows!!!

This probably can't be viewed thru my IE5 browser using XSL? I notice that IE browser displays XML in a tree view, but all nodes are initially expanded, and it displays the raw tags in addition to the data I want to see. I don't want to see the raw tags, and the nodes should all initially be collapsed.

Does anybody know of any kind of XML viewer that will display the XML the way I want to see it? Hopefully something "forgiving" of faulty xml syntax (like missing closing tags)

Or.... am I stretching XML too far past what it was intended to do??

Thanks for any thought on this!

 

[palbano]

>> Hopefully something "forgiving" of faulty xml
>> syntax (like missing closing tags)

That's just not going to happen. XML must be well formed or it is not XML.

When you view an XML document in IE your looking at HTML. The browser has an internal XSLT sheet that it uses to transform XML into that specific HTML format including the javascript that makes the expand/collapse feature. It does not take very much to reproduce a similar XSLT so you can apply your own criteria to it. Of course if you don't have valid XML it's not going to matter anyway.


-pete