David,
Basically I'm looking to augment the standard OFBiz functionality with
functionality specifically required in the book selling business. As an
absolute minimum, I need to be able to periodically refresh the OFBiz
product and supplier data with a subset of the ONIX data (new titles,
price changes, supplier info, etc). I also want to look at ways of
providing a richer set of search options specific to the book trade (eg,
title, publisher, ISBN, etc), and to have all of the ONIX data available
for back-office (and sometimes front-of-house) enquiries.
I've seen it suggested that one of the ways to provide richer content in
the OFBiz Product database is to use the Feature mechanism. I've played
around with this a little bit, and it might work, but I'd need to be
convinced about performance and maintainability. The ONIX dataset can
contain hundreds of thousands of records, and modelling these with the
OFBiz Feature feature seems a bit clumsy. I'm not sure what the impact
would be on search queries.
I'm still exploring my requirements, and at this stage about the only
thing I know for sure is that I need to synch ONIX data with OFBiz to
ensure OFBiz is using up-to-date info. Probably the other thing I know
for sure is that I need richer search options, and response needs to be
reasonable.
At the end of the day, one of the things I need to work out is how to
"integrate" (and I use the term loosely), ONIX and OFBiz.
Cheers, Iain
David E. Jones wrote:
Is the intent to map it to the OFBiz data model or services? I'm
guessing that's not the case if you're trying to create entities to
represent it.
If you're trying to create a data model for an XML Schema and not
mapping it to an existing data model, then you'll have to design a
data model to match it. XML is an hierarchical data structure which
is very different from a relational (table-based) one. Some design
will have to be done to decide how to structure things because there
are no natural equivalencies. There are, of course, some common
patterns for dealing with hierarchical and other structures in SQL,
but doing an effective mapping requires more of an understanding of
the data model so that the same data can be captured in both places
and this is very difficult to automate. You might find some
commercial tools that give you a good first pass though... ie to go
from XSD to SQL DDL.
-David
On Aug 7, 2006, at 6:51 PM, Iain Fogg wrote:
Chris,
Good question, and this probably exposes my ignorance of XST. Maybe
it's not the right technology. Maybe I need to find a tool that can
translate from XSD -> SQL. Then it would be straightforward to map
the relational table defs to the OFBiz entity def. My small brain
can't get round the mapping of the hierarchical XML Schema to a
relational one - at least not given it's size. Maybe when I was
younger :-)
In case anyone is interested, the schema I want to map is the ONIX
schema (used in the book trade).
Cheers, Iain
Chris Howe wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you need to know
what the source elements are in order to make an XST
to entity def? Absent knowing the structure of your
source it wouldn't matter what someone else's XST
looks like, it wouldn't work with yours.
--- Iain Fogg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
That's my question...has anyone already buit an XST
to do the conversion to OFBiz Entity defs?
BJ Freeman wrote:
the XSD defines the layout.
the XML is where the Entities definitions are.
you can try using an XST file to convert.
Iain Fogg sent the following on 8/7/2006 7:53 AM:
I have a slightly complicated XML Schema (.xsd)
that I would like to
import into OFBiz.
Has anyone written a tool to convert XML schemas
into OFBiz entity
definitions?
Cheers, Iain
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