I'm curious. Almost 2 weeks ago I submitted the question below and got no response at all. I thought "OK, this must have been too much of a basic noob question, they probably want me to go do some more homework and come back when I can ask a more proper question". I didn't think the question was all that basic, I was asking about an overall approach to using Xerces to solve a problem, not how to install it, set up my build environment, or write the code. So I went ahead and figured out what I needed on my own.
Recently another new user has joined the group and has been asking for and getting help on some pretty basic stuff like letting up VC++ with the proper include paths for building and got a step-by-step "click this, press that" response. I don't begrudge him the help he has been getting in the slightest, in fact I'm glad to see that the group will actually offer help at that level. My only question is "Why was my question completely ignored?" Did I say something offensive, violate some rule of etiquette, something like that? Just curious. -will -----Original Message----- From: Will Sappington Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 11:15 AM To: '[email protected]' Subject: proper way to use Xerces for what I'm trying to do 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
