XML

[CAM]

Does anyone here use XML? What use have you found for it? I had a play today and so far been able to take assessment manager data and apply a manually coded XML Schema to it to extract important details into a relatively clean XML file (sadly it still relies on columns being in the right order).

[vikpaw]

Well use it as much as SIMS requires for templates and marksheets.

 

Assessment, you might as well treat it as Excel. Did you manage anything quicker than Excel or that Excel couldn't do?

 

The report outputs are a better place for utilizing them. Either command reporter or the built in reports where you can provide your own stylesheet to manipulate the output. I've had to do that a lot to make it show my working week correctly.

[LosOjos]

What do you mean by "use XML?"

 

I use it in so much as I parse it for data when I'm extracting from SIMS in to my own systems and I use it (rarely!) when programming Android, but as far as using it for anything by choice, not so much.

[CAM]

I was wondering if it would be better to use for importing data into an existing spreadsheet or other system. Example: Take the contents of assessment.xml and put it into a tracking system where tags in specific places say "Put XML data here" which I haven't been able to work out in a normal spreadsheet or document.

 

One example is being asked to take a seating plan and make it read names and key indicators and place it in a classroom layout diagram. That's had me and my predecessor stumped for the better part of a year.

[Marci]

At one point most ajax stuff I dealt with involved generating and parsing XML... but nowadays everything tends to get flipped to JSON and done that way. IIRC XML has lost favor since HTML5 as it's not involved in the spec. To continue to use XML you have to remain in XHTML land. For your example above, I'd always tend to do it via PHP as a web page than in a spreadsheet - device agnostic.