Advice on XML in Oracle 8.0.5

Hi,

I'm involved in the process of designing a new application which needs to access an old Oracle Forms (using Oracle Server 8.0.5) based application. The application I'm about to design will have COM components as its core and it somehow needs to access the database tables managed by the Forms application.

If possible, I wouldn't like to have the COM components to know all the logic behind the database tables from the Forms application and I'd like to use XML to "communicate" with the old application. So I was planning to create a database table which would hold all events generated by my application. Each event would produce an XML text which I would save on a column of this table. A trigger on this table would fire each time a new event was registered, which would call a stored procedure which in turn would interpret the XML text and finally perform the necessary steps knowing the internal application logic.

This way, my new application would be abstracted of the internal logic and details of the old application and vice-versa.

The problem is that the old application is running on Oracle 8.0.5 and I don't know of any PL/SQL package which will enable a stored procedure to parse an XML text.

Any comments on the above design and any possible solutions will be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Nuno Guerreiro

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http://www.deja.com/ Received on Wed Jan 10 2001 - 15:59:39 CET