Re: Getting started with XML..

Jeremy schrieb:
> Simple question: we have an partner who wish to send into our
> application data from their system in the form of an XML document.
>
> We are running Oracle 9i R2 and the Oracle http listener and mod_plsql.
>
> Our app is built using the web pl/sql toolkit. We would like the partner
> to send us the the document by making an http call to a proceudre on our
> server and I assume 'post'-ing the data so that on our side we might
> have a procedure defined as
>
> procedure xml_receiver (p_transaction_id in number,
> p_xml_document in clob)
>
> Am I OK to this point - is this right?

I think so (i do not know web pl/sql). In short: If you have an HTTP server listening, someone can send an HTTP request. A browser for example sends an HTTP GET to retrieve an URL. Your partner will send an HTTP POST, that is the requst to send data to the server. He will send this HTTP POST with the data to your "executable" server component. Your server component processes the data and sends back the so called HTTP response, that can be html or xml or something else. CGI scripts, Java servlets and others are "executable" server components.

> If so, then the next piece of the puzzle is: what tools do we use to get
> the data values out of the XML document?

You need an XML parser.

> Finally, once we have processed the document, if we want send back an
> XML document with status information etc then I assume this can be
> assembled using the various HTP procedures - or is there a less 'home-
> grown' method for returning back an XML document?

You send back the HTTP response and, yes, this can be XML. XML is just text, you can simply write that into the response stream. E.g. in a Java servlet it would be:
PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
out.println("<xml/>");

Kai-Uwe Received on Fri Feb 04 2005 - 15:21:13 CST