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Betreft: Re: Betreft: Re: Betreft: Re: I hate SOAP
The problem with a CVS conversion tool compared with an XML convertion
tool is in general the various interpretations of the CVS format. Some
people don't use comma's but semi-colons or perhaps even tab
characters. Then of course there's the use of single quotes, double
quotes and in some cases no quotes at all. And of course supporting
different record types in a single CVS file does make it look pretty
complicated.
Just assume you need to export a list of today's orders from one
application and import it in another. You'll have customers with
master-detail links to the articles they have ordered. So one customer
could have ordered a dozen or so articles. Doing this in CVS means that
whatever convertion tool is going to convert it, it needs to know how
to see the difference between an customer or an article or else you
have a cheese sandwich that ordered an 'Alex Papadimoulis' or something silly like that. :-)
With XML you have at least these master-detail layers in your exported data.
Of course, the whole import/export thing also depends on the mapping
tool that you use to transform the export file from application A to an
import format for application B. In general, those convertions aren't
too difficult either. Often just a matter of changing field names,
maybe concatenating fields or providing default values for missing
fields. This process is called mapping and is one of the things my dad
earns his cash with. [:)] He creates custom mapping tools for specific
customers who are using those file formats like CVS and EDI, and quite
a few other custom formats too. But for XML there's some very easy
mapping tool where you just create a mapping algorithm by drawing lines
between the fields of both import and output format, and in-between you
can also define some special actions that need to be done in the
convertion. Once you've set this up correctly, the system can even
create C++ sourcecode so you can compile the mapper to an executable
for your favorite platform and use it. Haven't seen such a tool yet for
CVS files.
Which is a good thing, though. My dad earns quite well with these
custom mapping tools he writes. For him, they're often very simple to
create yet he can charge quite a bit for writing those tools for his
customers. [;)] And they'll happily pay him too.
So, now I think about it... Yeah, darned XML! Everyone, go back to
using CVS or EDI or whatever other format you like! My dad needs a new
car again. [:D]
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