Microsoft Access 2003
is Office's database application. You can create a
table of data—an Access database—and label each field
with a name you'd like to use as an XML element
name. One way to get started is by importing an existing XML document
into Access. Here's how to do it.
Open Access, and then select File → Get External Data
→ Import. In the Import dialog box, make sure it says
XML in the "Files of
type" pull-down menu. Navigate to the working
directory and click on the file time.xml. Then
click Import. Not all information is preserved, but close.
You will then see the Import XML dialog box. Click on the Options
button, and the dialog will appear as it does in . You can choose to import the XML structure
only (i.e., only the markup) or the structure with data (i.e., the
markup and content). You can also choose to append the data to an
existing table; i.e., a table with the same name as the original
document (in this example, time). If you append
the data, the content of the XML document is added to a record of the
database file using the same fields that are created from the element
names.
Figure 1. Import XML dialog box in Access 2003
After you have imported the document, you should see a database table
in the navigator view of Access, as shown in . Click on the table's icon to
open it. In , you can see that the fields
are labeled with the names of elements in
time.xml.
Figure 2. time table in Access 2003 navigator view
Figure 3. time.mdb in Access 2003
To save this data as an XML document, select File → Export,
and the Export Table dialog box appears. In the
"Save as type" pull-down menu,
select XML, and enter a filename, such as
TimeTable.xml. Then click Export All.
At this point, a few more choices are presented in the Export XML
dialog (). You can check one to three
boxes to tell Access what you want to do. When all three boxes are
checked, Access will save your database as an XML document
(TimeTable.xml); create and save an XML Schema
for the saved XML document (TimeTable.xsd);
create and save an XSLT stylesheet that can transform the newly saved
XML document as HTML (TimeTable.xsl); and create
and save an HTML document based on this transformation
(TimeTable.htm).
Access
reportedly supports only some of the XML Schema structures
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/), which
will be reflected in the saved XSD file; namely,
xsd:schema, xsd:element,
xsd:appinfo, xsd:annotation,
xsd:complexType,
xsd:simpleType,
xsd:restriction, xsd:choice,
and xsd:all.
TIP
As exported, TimeTable.htm can be displayed only
in Internet Explorer because it uses a VBScript function
ApplyTransform() to apply
TimeTable.xsl.
Figure 4. Export XML dialog box in Access 2003
If you click the More Options button on the Export XML dialog box,
you can pick more settings for the XML document, the XML Schema, or
the stylesheet. Under the Data tab, you can see that you can export
all records of the database or just the current one. You can select
UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding. You can also apply a transformation (an
XSLT stylesheet) to be applied at the time of export. Under the
Schema tab, you get to choose whether to include primary key and
index information or leave it out. You can also choose whether to
save the schema as a separate file or embed the schema with the XML
document. The Presentation tab lets you save as an additional
document in HTML or ASP format and choose whether to include images.
All three tabs let you browse to a location for the saved file as
well as name the file.
