XML based VB6 collections and .NET 1

[DavidQR]

I would like an opinion on the merits of building and storing VB6 colllection in XML. This was proposed in a VBPJ July2001 article by Richard Dalton and located on MSDN archive at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvbpj01/html/pc0107.asp.

I need to build a VB6 application now which may be moved to .NET 3 years down the road, as .NET usage is not fully mature in our shop.

Should I go through the troubles of using MSXML libraries to do this?

Thanks in advance for sharing your insights.

DavidQR

 

[chiph]

You need to look at how much data you plan to store.

We built a XML DOM to cache customer info, and it worked great until we had a client with 80,000 customers, at which point the CPU on the server was maxed out by the XPath queries to retrieve the data (XPath does a top-to-bottom search, doesn't do a binary search).

I would say the max would be about 2000 records for reasonable fetch times.

Chip H.


If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ222-2244 first

 

[harebrain]

It looks like the author answers your question in the final paragraph:

The performance issue alone might not be sufficient to justify using XML-based collections. But the ease of marshaling and copying objects, the ability to detect and handle changes automatically, and the ability to tag objects with metadata all suggest that it's a good idea to consider building a more intelligent kernel for your collection classes. If you can achieve this intelligence while maintaining or even improving performance, so much the better.

If the alleged benefits don't add anything to your application, forget it.

Also note that the article's "What you need" list includes "MSXML 2.0 or 3.0." We're currently at 4.0 (or is it 5.0?) Three years from now, things are bound to be different. Trying to stay ahead of the game that far in advance is a risk, meaning you could be doing a lot of work today with little or no payoff later.