Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Campaign Contribution Reporting: CSV to XML to Flat File

Let's now look at a scenario that's a bit different than the first two above. I'm on the board of a nonprofit group based in Seattle known as the Electronic Reporting Design Institute (www.erdi.org), which seeks to facilitate government-mandated reporting of contributions to political campaigns. That data is currently collected and reported to state and federal governments in a variety of formats including paper, CSV files exported from spreadsheets, and various flat file formats. The data is collated and stored by various means, but for this discussion let's assume that several states import the data into their systems by flat files (at least when they can get it electronically). The ERDI ...