Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

By Steven Holzner

• Table of Contents
  • About the Author
  • Acknowledgments
  • We Want to Hear from You!
  • Introduction
  • Part I: At a Glance
  • Day 1. Welcome to XML
  • Day 2. Creating XML Documents
  • Day 3. Creating Well-Formed XML Documents
  • Day 4. Creating Valid XML Documents: DTDs
  • Declaring Attributes in DTDs
  • Day 6. Creating Valid XML Documents: XML Schemas
  • Day 7. Creating Types in XML Schemas
  • Part I. In Review
  • Day 8. Formatting XML by Using Cascading Style Sheets
  • Day 9. Formatting XML by Using XSLT
  • Day 10. Working with XSL Formatting Objects
  • Part II. In Review
  • Part III: At a Glance
  • Day 11. Extending HTML with XHTML
  • Day 12. Putting XHTML to Work
  • Day 13. Creating Graphics and Multimedia: SVG and SMIL
  • Day 14. Handling XLinks, XPointers, and XForms
  • Part III. In Review
  • Part IV: At a Glance
  • Day 15. Using JavaScript and XML
  • Day 16. Using Java and .NET: DOM
  • Day 17. Using Java and .NET: SAX
  • Day 18. Working with SOAP and RDF
  • Part IV. In Review
  • Part V: At a Glance
  • Day 19. Handling XML Data Binding
  • Day 20. Working with XML and Databases
  • Day 21. Handling XML in .NET
  • Part V. In Review
  • Appendix A. Quiz Answers

Part V: At a Glance

Data Handling and XML

Part V examines how to work with XML and databases. You'll start by taking a look at the extensive data-binding techniques available in Internet Explorer. These techniques let you treat XML documents like databases by treating elements as database records and connecting the data in the child elements of each record in HTML controls.

You're also going to see how various true database systems use XML behind-the-scenes by writing database tables out in XML and reading them back in as well. And you'll see that some database systems let you address the data in XML documents by using XPath expressions.

Treating XML documents like databases with standard database software is okay, but it doesn't go too far. We're going to go farther. In particular, you'll see how a relatively new XML specification, XQuery, provides a native-XML way of working with XML documents as if they were databases.

In addition, you're going to take a look at working with XML in .NET. There's a great deal of built-in support for XML in the .NET programming languages, and you'll see what they have to offer.

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