Thanks Tom. This gives me something to chew on. I will research it further and keep you posted with the latest. Sangita
"Watson, Tom" wrote: > I have been researching this also and there would seem to be a lot of demand > since lots of corporate data is in flat files. I have basically seen three > approaches: > > 1. Create a java application that reads in your DTD, reads in your data (a > line at a time) and then creates the internal DOM structure using those two > sources. Once you have the internal DOM built, you can serialize the XML as > an output stream. > > Advantages - everything is done in one program > Disadvantages - fairly complex and dependent upon a specific implementation > of parser (IBM xml4j version 2 API) > > Take a look at "XML and Java Building Web Applications" by Maruyama, Tamura > and Uramoto...chapter 3. > > 2. (courtesy of Doug Tidwell) > a simpler approach would be a Java application that reads in your data and > simply creates XML tags associated with each column. Somthing like this, > > <?xml version="1.0"?> > <document> > <row> > <column 1>xxxxx</column1> > <column 2>xxxxx</column2> > ..... > </row> > ....more rows.... > </document> > > then, you use xalan and stylesheets to "render" this XML format into a > format suitable for your particular application, where you do conversion of > columns to actual meaningful tags: > > ... > <employees> > <employee sex="F"> > <serial number>000000</serial number> > <name> > <first_name>john</first_name> > <last_name>doe</last_name> > </name> > ..... > > the last step is to run it against the parser to validate against your DTD > > Advantage - much simpler and parser independence > Disadvantage - more programs/steps/coordination required > > 3. buy from a vendor (I am researching this but have not found much). > > Tom Watson