Building Oracle XML Applications

Loading Datagrams with the XML SQL Utility

The Oracle XML SQL Utility is a command-line utility and a set of Java classes used to automate getting XML out of your database and putting XML into your database. We have seen that the OracleXMLQuery class handles all the details of getting SQL query results out of the database in a canonical XML format. The XML SQL Utility also contains a companion class called OracleXMLSave that performs the opposite job of putting XML information back into Oracle tables or views.

The OracleXMLSave class understands how to insert any information that OracleXMLQuery knows how to produce. In other words, the canonical structure of the output from OracleXMLQuery defines the kinds of structures for input that OracleXMLSave can automatically insert for us.

Transforming Datagrams for Insertion

The fact that OracleXMLSave can only insert XML documents that look like they were produced by OracleXMLQuery may at first sound like a drastic limitation. However, this is not the case by any stretch of the imagination. By taking advantage of an appropriate XSLT transformation, virtually any XML document can be transformed to the canonical format required by OracleXMLSave. Given an arbitrary XML document YourDoc and a database table or view into which you want to insert the document, you can create an XSLT transformation that transforms the source document YourDoc into a target document YourDocCanonical having precisely the structure needed for automatic insertion ...