Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Printed Output and Export

Not every application offers the ability to import data by means other than a user keying it. However, nearly every application has the ability to create printed documents, even if it doesn't provide features for exporting data files. Certain steps always have to be performed. Certain aspects aren't that much different for printing, exporting flat files, or exporting XML documents.

The key thing to bear in mind when coding your XML export as opposed to a flat file export is that we generally export several logical documents to one physical flat file. For XML we must export each logical document to a separate physical file. A well-formed XML document can have only a single top-level Element, the document root Element. ...