Access Hacks

Hack #95. Use Access as an XML Database

Have Access work as a front end to your XML data.

A few hacks throughout this book (see the list at the end of this hack) explore XML usage with Access. This hack presents the crowning achievement: a complete XML database. To clarify, this hack shows you how Access can read from and write to XML files and have the data appear on a form for viewing and editing. The form has the requisite database functionality: browse, add a record, update a record, and delete a record.

The power behind making this work is to incorporate the MSXML parser from Microsoft. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/xml and see "Provide Complete XML Control to Any Version of Access" [Hack #87] for an introduction to getting and using the parser. The parser is the key to getting Access to do more than simple XML imports and exports.

Figure 9-18 shows the form used in the application. The displayed record is from an XML file. The form has Previous and Next buttons for navigating through records, as well as Update and Delete buttons. The New button is for entering new records, and the Save button is used for saving new records to the file.

Figure 9-18. Displaying data from an XML file

The data is completely external, but it doesn't come from a table. This application contains no tables, whether linked or connected with ADO or ODBC. In fact, this application contains nothing ...