Object Orientation in arrays

[David Bovill]

I thought this would be your baby :)

On 22 Nov 2005, at 13:49, Ruslan Zasukhin wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> Do you talk about mapping of XML document into database ?

Yes.

> Any nested level of XML can be simulated on self-recursive table.

I just love recursion :)

> Generally speaking any XML document can be stored into SINGLE self- 
> recursive
> table.
>
> Also it is possible to use 2 tables for this, to make things little  
> more
> clean.

Would be great to have an example of this for / with your  
documentation - it is not an easy concept to grasp without a good  
example?

> ---------
> FYI, we have realize that Valentina with its Object-Relational  
> model is
> perfect for XML work. This have point one my friend, that is  
> teacher in
> university. He say that we must add into Valentina support of  
> XQuery, DOM,
> DAV, HTTP, ...

So XQuery is an evolution of XPath? Always ahead of the game I see!

Can I give you an example we are working on to see how Valentina  
would fit into the picture - rhetorical :)

     1) We have a bunch of interfaces that generate farily complex  
XML documents to post to web services - person metadata, video clip  
metadata and so forth.

     2) These web services parse this data and store it in relational  
databases (sorry postGres)

     3) Other web services queerie the database and return XML

     4) Custom fields are stored as XML in a generic record so that  
we can extend easily by just adding interface elements on the clients  
- for retireve and display purposes - later to be integrated into db  
if required

     5) Revolution based interfaces can generate and store XML  
locally - batch uploading later and used as persistant off-line store.

Now what would be nice is to use Valentina to store these local XML  
structures in a flexible way (not just the relational model which is  
hard to cusotmise). How would this marry to your comments on storing  
XML in Valentina?

What would be nicer would be to be able to easily translate the local  
Valentina model into a relational model for the online services - not  
an option to use the Valentina Server at this stage.

Finally as part of the MVC / Rails discussion this online database  
would be able to generate much of the code stubs for an AJAX web  
application.

That is a flexible Rev / Valentina offline client would be able to  
generate relational tables and therefore act as an Rails / Ajax  
scaffold generator.

What sort of flexibility would be possible in terms of storing and  
retrieving relatively generic XML?