In the poll, I'm one of the people that uses the Internet Toolkit to read and write XML. The toolkit gives you property and method nodes for working with DOM (Document Object Model) objects. When I tried using them, I found that I was repeating certain bits of code over and over, and because the nodes are large on screen, my code was large on screen. That's why I added two VIs to the Moore Good Ideas
free library, XML Append Child and XML Close Child. With those additions, I'm able to write complex clusters to hierarchical XML files in a tidy way.
Of course, I've been down a similar path to this before with .ini files. The MGI library has routines that facilitate writing arrays to .ini files and reading them back in, and for years I used those when manually creating code to read and write complex clusters to .ini files. Each time I modified my cluster to support program enhancements, I'd modify the corresponding read and write VIs. Then came the OpenG Variant Config file VIs, which can read and write arbitrary clusters, and the need to maintain the read and write VIs was wonderfully eliminated. Most recently, MGI has released the Read/Write Anything VIs which provide 100x to 500x speed improvement over the OpenG Variant Config file VIs, so the .ini file situation is in excellent shape.
Back to the XML world, we're still at the manual coding stage. It would be great if we had the XML equivalent of the OpenG Variant Config file VIs. Of course, with XML, you may also have the requirement to follow an industry specified schema, so the problem is a bit harder. I wonder if someone will solve this problem for us...
David A. Moore, Ph.D.
President
Moore Good Ideas, Inc.
