iFS and XML documents

3004

I'm glad iFS is finally out. I scanned
through all the online documents I could
find, but couldn't see anything on what
I am interested in.

I'd like to use Oracle to store XML
documents and retrieve various views
of them. By "documents" I mean actual,
deep, published documents; I don't mean
database records.

Is it expected that the iFS will be used
for this sort of purpose? Can it be? If
so, will the Developer's Guide have info
or am I missing where such info is already
available?

Thanks,

Chris Hamlin

3004

The Developer's Guide should have the information you need. We are planning our Developer's Kit release (Dev. Guide, JavaDoc, sample code) for mid-May.

3004

OK, I got the SDK just released and took
a quick scan. I see that we might need to
define our own document, with attributes,
and you can even define embedded attributes.

But, this seems to be an explosion of the
DTD structure, and I don't see if we can
really do this for deep-structured documents
that aren't basically db stuff.

For example, almost any element can contain
math, which can contain lots of
stuff, including fractions, which can contain
fractions again, etc. So the abstract
structure is not strictly a tree, but
contains cycles. This can be quite deep at
times.

Is it intended that iFS will be used for such
stuff, really? And has it ever been used for
such a purpose? All the examples are very
simple so I'm wondering whether it is worth
pursuing. Thanks for any info or pointers.


Chris Hamlin