Re: ISO: techniques or examples of visualizing xml

From: Bruce Hartweg (bruce-news_at_hartweg.us)
Date: 03/11/04 

Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:02:20 -0600

lvirden@yahoo.com wrote:

>
> I'm looking for friends with whom I might brain storm about an approach
> to take for a personal project.
>
> I've a collection of information which I received in XML format. I
> don't believe there is a DTD for the format, and in reality that's
> probably okay - the data in there is pretty simple. The format is
> quite standard - each database entry is a single xml record, containing
> 12 attributes. Of the 12 attributes, I see that only 7 or 8 have
> interesting information.
>
> What I'm dreaming of is some way to easily parse and display this
> data in a tabular fashion, with some hopes of being able to click on a
> column in some fashion to get that column to sort (ala a spread***),
> and where it is pretty easy to click on a particular row and column
> to fully display the info there (9 of the columns are 20 chars or less,
> 3 are text descriptions that can go on for quite a bit).
>
> It seems to me that the xml should be pretty simple to parse - but I've never
> written anything to parse xml before, so I have to learn about one
> of the xml extensions and how to use the results of the parse.
>
> I also suspect that making use of something like tktable would help in
> the visualization.
>
> Anyone know of any simple examples that might do something like this that
> I could use as a learning device?
>
> Also, what other things should I take into consideration when solving a problem
> like this?

You could just use one of the XML extensions to parse the file directly
and then stick it into TkTable, or it might be easier to just create a simple
style*** and use an off the shelf XSLT processor to transform then data
into a csv file & then you can easily import it into a Tk app, or just
load up your favorite spread***.

Bruce

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