Is FOR XML EXPLICIT still an accepted technique?

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Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:50:41 -0400

I have inherited (someone else built it) an ASP IIS site attached to a SQL
Server 2000 database. It is quite a large web site job and I don't want to
rewrite it in .NET. I don't have the time to do that and I am not familiar
with .NET. Our company still uses VB6 for our products.

The remote site allows the user to select recordsets which currently can be
emailed as HTML or TEXT and also downloaded in an Excel (XLS) file. My job
is to create XML from the recordset, transmit it to the client browser
(which is part of a VB program) and have the client program load it into the
local SQL Server database.

I am new at using XML and have done considerable reading (my head hurts).
Some of the books are a couple years old. The recordsets are composed of
header records from the main table and child records (one to many) from 3
other tables.

I am leaning toward using FOR XML EXPLICIT in conjunction with ADODB stream
sent to the Response object. I have gotten a simple FOR XML AUTO program to
work properly and send the stream back to the browser, but now I need to
shape the more complicated XML properly.

I just want to make sure that the FOR XML EXPLICIT will not become "legacy"
code in the next few years. I have looked at using XML Views briefly, but do
not like the setup required on the SQL server to use them. It will be a
hosted remote server that houses the IIS ASP code and the SQL database.

So before I spend weeks writing and debugging the process, I want to make
sure I haven't missed some spectacular new, reliable and "easy" method of
accomplishing the same thing.

Also I plan on using the Transact/SQL OPENXML function to write the
resulting XML to the database at the client site.

There is one other problem. Using the ADODB stream sent to the Response
object results in the XML remaining "hidden" (such that a blank page appears
in the browser) which is fine....except I don't know how to access it. I
have experience using XML data islands (in HTML pages) to populate SQL
Server and also opening XML files on disk and writting to SQL Server.

Thanks for your help in advance....

• Previous message: Ally Parker: "RE: Importing XML data into a SQL Server database"
• Next in thread: Roger Wolter[MSFT]: "Re: Is FOR XML EXPLICIT still an accepted technique?"
• Reply: Roger Wolter[MSFT]: "Re: Is FOR XML EXPLICIT still an accepted technique?"
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