Re: XML Reports

On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 22:17:49 -0600, Keith Russell wrote:

Hi. I downloaded, installed, and ran the "Clean Up FrontPage Html Sitewide"
extension. Of course, the report is created in XML format. Now how the heck
do I view the report?

When Dreamweaver displays it, it displays it code view, which is not very
readable....

Anybody???

Thanks.

--
Keith

xml isn't really intended to be read as-is. It needs to be transformed into
a presentation through css, xsl, or dumped into an ADO recordset and
transformed with server-side code, theres many ways to transform an xml
document into something presentable - which is the reason for xml.
since you mention the word report in the subject, then theres way to
transform the data into various graphs if you wanted - just have to learn
how.

--
Ron

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 04:03:46 -0400, Ron wrote:

xml isn't really intended to be read as-is. It needs to be transformed into
a presentation ....

Thanks for clarifying this, Ron. That was the impression I was getting. I
downloaded several free "XML viewers," and all of them just displayed the
source code.

Considering this, I find it strange that Dreamweaver would generate its
reports in XML format. For example, I generated a report of my FrontPage
code cleanup, but the report does me no good as is. How does everyone use
these reports?

--
Keith

Most xml editing programs (like XmlSpy) will display raw xml in a tree-view
like manner...this is because the presentation of the xml data is up to the
developer (you). If you want to make raw xml presentable, you'll want to
look into using .css or .xsl to do so. I'd say one of the hardest things
about working with xml data (like the report you have) is writing code to
make it presentable...unless your using .NET and can load the xml into a
dataset and then work with the dataset.

Perhaps someone can write an extension to make the DW XML report displayed
in some default template, if I had to do something with the reports, I'd
definetly choose .NET - let DW gen the report and save to a folder, make an
ASP.NET page with a list of the various reports, user selects a report to
view, xml is programatically loaded into a DataSet and displayed in ASP.NET.

But thats why DW gens xml reports - to let you decide how to present it.

--
Ron