Real World XML And Domino

I'm in Mark Vardy of IBM Software Services for Lotus' session here at UK Admin & Developer 2004. He's a somewhat quiet speaker, so typing while paying attention is more difficult than it is with some other speakers. I'm going to try to stick to the convention of my previous live conference blogging posts of using the past tense, but I'm definitely finding it hard to stay consistent.

Alan first spoke about using XML for data exchange. That is, after all, what XML was designed for. Leveraging XSL, DXL and the DXL import/export functions is the presumed best practice. It all boils down to three lines of code that build a chain that processes an import stream through an XMLTransformer and an XMLImporter, What about error handling, though? From what I understand, the standard error handling in LotuScript will not deal with it particularly gracefully.

Next, Alan spoke about using XML to build a fully customizable view presentation, with re-orderable columns and choice of sort sequences, etc. Doing the math, his objective worked out to 600 different permutations of a view display. It can be done with a single view, with a calculated-on-the-fly style sheet to control the transform of the XML generated by the view. XSL makes my head hurt (though it's not as bad as Perl, which makes my head explode). Strangely, the idea of dynamically computed XSL doesn't seem to me to be as painful. In fact, it makes total sense. Why make someone manually create 600 style sheets? In fact, given the arcane syntax of XSL, why make anyone construct even one? Mark used a form to compute the XSL. I'm starting to wonder though, wouldn't it be cool to design a view that dynamically computes an XSL style sheet? Very oddly, that concept seems really cool to me, when by all rights it probably ought to make my head go flying off at Mach 2.

Alan continued on with several more interesting examples. I have to confess though, my thoughts were elsewhere for much of the rest of the presentatation. Thinking about XSL, which is after all just another dialect of XML, it occurred to me that a project I've been working on with the goal of making it much easier for LotusScript programmers to generate database-driven XML might also make it much easier for LotusScript programmers to generate database-driven XSL! It's not views that I'm talking about, however. I'm going to have to put some further thought into this though. I'll come back to describe it sometime later.