Connecting with XSLT
Published 4.18.2007 by ~mattg
The final task in my long list of internal application enhancements was to automate the export/import of various data from our current in-house CRM software to a customized installation of our own software suite. At first, I thought this might be a bit of a daunting task, but then I remembered that we already have a connector that does everything I needed to do.
The “connector” is, in my opinion, a pretty useful tool. While it is, by no means, a full-fledged connector, it does the job in getting info into and out of our application. The nice part about it is that it works through a series of sinks. So you specify a connection and a source table or view and you get back XML. From there, you can use XSLT transformations to get the XML into a state that’s recognizable for import and do an import. That’s the really simple version. More complicated setups allow you to go record by record, send notifications, trap errors and successes, etc.
This gave me a good chance to take a cursory look at XSLT, thanks mainly to W3Schools. I knew very little about it before this, but never really had the need to write an XSLT template. While I by no means an expert now, I at least have a better understanding of the technology. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find another place to use it.
Filed under .NET Development
