Office 2003 XML

Importing XML into Access Using the GUI

Access provides fewer options for importing XML, but what it provides is simple and reasonably solid. Access lets you import data that looks roughly like the data it exports, and only as tables or additions to tables. This can be a great way to load new data into a database or add newly updated information, but it does make it difficult to transfer complex interrelated structures between databases. A single document may contain XML that refers to multiple tables, of course, and XSLT transformations on import can help as well.

To get started, we’ll import the code shown in Example 8-11 into the Access database previously used for exporting.

Example 8-11. New data for import

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <dataroot xmlns:od="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:officedata" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/ 2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="ch0802.xsd"> <books> <ISBN>0596002637</ISBN> <Title>Practical RDF</Title> <Tagline>Solving Problems with the Resource Description Framework</Tagline> <Short_x0020_Description>The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a structure for describing and interchanging metadata on the Web.</Short_x0020_Description> <Long_x0020_Description>The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a structure for describing and interchanging metadata on the Web - anything from library catalogs and worldwide directories to bioinformatics, Mozilla internal data structures, and knowledge bases for artificial intelligence ...