MSDN - MSDN Index & InfoPath or Excel

Author

MSDN Index & InfoPath or Excel

rick cameron

2005-05-10, 3:56 am

Hi, all

I have been using MS Access to track the usage of MSDN discs in our company
(we are volume licensed, so every programmer has an MSDN license, but we
just have a few media sets). This is based on the last Access-format
database that MSDN sent out, years ago.

The app has a table for users and a table for loans, and does lookups in the
MSDN database to display product names, etc.

I want to update this to use the XML data on the Index disc. Access 2003
completely blows it when importing the XML files, and InfoPath (about which
I know zip) refuses even to try opening them.

Excel does a reasonable job - but it's not automatic; I have to fiddle a bit
to get the data into a spreadsheet correctly; and then it's just in a
spreadsheet, not an MDB.

Has anyone managed to make InfoPath work with these XML files? Can it be
used to maintain a list of users & loans, while doing lookups in the MSDN
XML files?

Alternatively, does anyone have a suggestion for an automated process to
convert the XML files into an Access database? I'd like to re-run the
process every time the Index disc is updated.

Thanks!

- rick

rick cameron

2005-05-11, 3:57 am

An update on my attempts to make use of the MSDN index data:

- InfoPath was useless, as was Access. Neither could get useful data out of
the XML files
- Excel does pretty well - it inhales the file, creating a map; by excluding
schema stuff from the map, you can create a workbook that can be refreshed.
But it's just Excel...
- ADO.NET reads the XML files like a champ!

So for now I'm using my baby, Crystal Reports, to get the data using
ADO.NET, and creating a report than links this to my Access database. I'd
prefer to be able to get at the data in Access (or some otehr app I could
use to update my database of loans), but reporting is almost as good.

Cheers

- rick

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