Hello all, I am writing a document management application that has to deal with a very large number of entries and related tables. Basically, I have a database that contains a "Documents" table, which may have several hundred thousand entries, that has a number of relationships to various other tables, such as "Authors," which is a many-to-many connection with "Persons," and a one-to-many connection with "Pages" (each document may contain anywhere from one up to hundreds of pages).
My problem is that I am trying to display all of this information in a number of ways, including a spreadsheet-type format that would show one line per document, along with the author and page information, but I am having a hard time figuring out an efficient way of getting the data into an XML format for OL. Almost none of the OL or middle layer examples I have come across deal with nested XML elements; I have included an example of how I am trying to format the XML at the end of this email. I was using solely Struts2 for the middle layer, but was having a hard time representing all of the relationships. I switched to a combination of Struts2 and Hibernate, and wrote my own Struts2 result to format the XML, but the process is prohibitively slow and memory hungry, mostly for storing the data in the persistence layer, but also somewhat for formatting the XML. I am looking into using paging, but I have not found any good OL examples for that, nor have I found any good examples in general for dealing with a large amount of information that requires nested XML elements like the ones I describe above. Can someone please help me get on the right track? Links to examples would be great, including suggestions for better technologies or better ways to format my data. If simple paging will solve my issue, I would be grateful for information on how to plumb OL together with the middle layer to accomplish this. If others have worked on applications dealing with this kind of data volume (hundreds of thousands of entries, with anywhere from five to a couple hundred related entries each), I would welcome any insight or advice you might have. Example XML for one document: <Document Id="1" Title="Example Doc Title" Date="April 2, 2012"> <Author Id="1" FirstName="John" LastName="Smith"/> <Author Id="2" FirstName="John" LastName="Doe"/> <Page Id="1" ImageFile="documents/image1.tif"/> <Page Id="2" ImageFile="documents/image2.tif"/> <Page Id="3" ImageFile="documents/image3.tif"/> </Document> Thank you! -- Justin Ellis 646-783-9387 Fax: 866-448-6503 [email protected] www.LightBulbLaw.com
