Re: XML generator

[achrist@easystreet.com]

David Botton wrote:
> 
> If you are on Win32, try GNATCOM and the MS XML control. I've used it for
> some time now with great success.
> 

I've used it some a few months ago, but I didn't think that I had 
great success. My application was an editor and viewer for some 
particular XML data -- involved reading a large (maybe 1MB, 1000 
items in a tree) file of XML, providing interactive access and update 
for the XML contents, and than writing it back out.  I succeeded in 
doing that, but the MSXML  API was not very good in providing update 
functions, from what I found. The updating was done by providing the 
new XML data flattened into a string representation, regardless of 
how many levels of structure or how many attributes it contained.  
This is a little much of brute force and ignorance to look like a 
good idea in Ada.  Maybe I missed something.  I would like to see 
some good examples of XML creation and manipulation in Ada.  

Maybe I missed something or didn't understand how it was supposed to 
work.  My recollection is that examples in some other languages, eg VB, 
were able to have the program structure match the XML data structure
a little better, but they did that by being less type-safe than the Ada
interface to MSXML.  Maybe I missed something.  I would like to 
see some good examples of XML creation and manipulation in Ada.  

My impression was that MSXML was designed to provide access to XML 
data, but that it was very weak for updating of XML data. 


Al