Using ASP within an XML program

[Buck Buchanan]

Can I use ASP coding to access an Access Data base with a program with a file extension of .XML?

I have an RSS feed, in XML, and I would like to access and update some information within an Access DB. I know how to do it using ASP.

This RSS feed stuff is new to me, but I do have one working, using an XML file. It seems to me that XML is needed for an RSS feed, but I dunno for sure.

Can I create a TXT file from within the XML file? I know how to do that too, in ASP, and it would be help to me if I could do that too...

Thanks,

Buck

[Mike Stefanik]

XML is a plain text markup language used to store data. I think what you're asking here is there a way to parse XML using ASP. For that, you could take a look at the Chilkat XML Parser for ASP. It's free, and if you explore their site, they have some examples of how to use it.

Generally speaking, XML parsers come in two flavors: SAX and DOM. SAX (Simple API for XML) is an event driven parser; as it parses the document it fires events which allows your application to process the data. It's fast and it's very efficient for processing large XML documents, but it's not very good for "random" access to the data in the document. DOM (Document Object Model) provides an interface for the comple document, and allows you to easily reference any part of it; however, DOM requires that the complete XML document be loaded into memory and parsed before you can access the data. For "typical" XML documents that's usually not much of an issue, but if you had one that was hundreds of megabytes, you'd want to use a SAX parser.

[Knuth Konrad]

I'm pretty sure that most (IIS-) systems that allow you to use ASP, have MS's MSXML installed, which works just fine from within ASP/VBScript. No need to use a 3rd party program/component for ASP.

[Mike Stefanik]

Probably not necessary, but from what I gather, the Chilkat control is easier to work with and I'm presuming here (perhaps a mistake on my part) that simpler would be better for him. In any case, there's there's a lot of choices available for actually doing the work of parsing an XML document.