Hi Peter, I have to say I'm surprised by Andre's belief that XSLT is easy. Certainly everything I've read about it (albeit read in a tangential fashion) has led me to believe that it is extremely complex. That's not to say that it's not the best way to manipulate XML (which begs the question as to whether or not one should be using XML in the first place if it's hard to manipulate).
>From your description it doesn't sound like your major concern is with graphs/charts or even fonts and images. I had thought that might have been where your concerns lay. I absolutely think you should not be re-keying data. That is a crazy idea (and one that has been crazy for about 25 years). I still don't quite understand why you are re-keying the data. If it is so that it can be presented to your clients in a spreadsheet so that they can annotate/edit etc., even this spreadsheet data should just be extracted from your files and then the spreadsheet launched with this extraction in it. Or is that the spreadsheet contains formulae, and you are re-keying the data to fit in with the layout of the spreadsheet? My apologies if I'm sounding obtuse and there is an obvious reason why this can't be done. I'm really not a SQL bigot. Generally I avoid SQL and do as much as I can with arrays. But I think it sounds ideal for your situation. Not only will you be able to extract relevant datasets to use in your periodic reporting, but the data will also be in a format where your clients would be able to manipulate it even if you were not around to do it. Of course, they would need to have someone who could understand the data structure and write the SQL. SQL skills are still far more widespread than are skills with either awk or XSLT or Revolution. Furthermore, there are specific tools for reporting on SQL databases. Bernard _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
