RE: RE: [xsl] I have the XSLT, now need to make it usable asuser-inp ut form?

[cknell@xxxxxxxxxx]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:     "Kathy Burke" <Kathy_Burke@xxxxxxxxx>
> 
> I wanted to ... save the entire XML instance to a field in a 
> database, then call upon that info using
> XSLT etc.
> 

Exactly how it's done depends on the nature of the program receiving the content of the HTML form. That is to say, the specifics of the server-side code depend on the HTTP server and the database. Are you using IIS or Apache, Java Server Pages, or ActiveServer Pages, or Perl CGI scripts? The answers to those questions will give you the particulars, but in general, here's how I handle it.

I place user input controls on the HTML page to permit the user to add and modify data. These I don't put in an HTML form, because I'm not going to send those values directly to the server. Instead, I create a form containing a single text input control and set the form's action attribute to the server handler and the form's style.display property to "none".

I write a JavaScript which captures the user's input and constructs an XML string (a well-formed, serialized document, if you will). When whatever I set up to cause the update to the database occurs (usually a button click), I call the JavaScript function that assembles the XML from the user input controls, set the value of the hidden text input to the output of that function, and submit the form to the server.

At the server you can perform an insert or update to your database and store the whole string in a single column. If you later want to query the document, you can retrieve the string and using the server-side programming objects available to you, create an XML document object from the string and query it with XPath.

-- 
Charles Knell
cknell@xxxxxxxxxx - email


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