I'm new to both XML and Xerces, literally starting from scratch. From what I've seen in the documentation and some of the posts here, Xerces provides a lot of capabilities and there may be more than one way to accomplish a particular task. I'm trying to make sense of everything and I have an idea for an approach to the task I've been assigned, but I have no idea if it's a good approach or even the right way to do it. I'm hoping that someone here can help me so I don't' spend too much time going down dead-end paths.
Here's what I'm trying to do. Some of our applications are configured with a hierarchical .ini file. There are 3 levels - application, section (within an application), and item (within a section). Users of the configuration utility class call a method getItem(appID, sectionName, itemName) to retrieve the value of the requested item. The .ini files are pretty standard flat text files with configuration items specified as name/val pairs. We'd like to use XML instead of flat .ini files. I've gotten Xerces to build and run with the configuration utility, so far I can do pretty simple stuff like getElementsByName() and walk node lists, get their lengths and so on. I figure I can find a specific item by walking node lists, but what I'd really like to have is a way of directly accessing a unique element using its application/section/item names. Someone here (my office) asked if I had tried an "xpath", I don't know what that is, I'm gonna go find out, but I'm concerned that there may be an approach using XML that is fundamentally different than how you go about this using a flat file. That's what I'm looking to find out first, if there's a general "best" way to do this sort of thing, and then, whether yes or no, the specifics of how to implement it. Any help will be greatly appreciated. -will
