How yesterday in my mini-project strategy mentioned, I first needed to create a XML-File with all the Formula One Race Tracks.
And I was thinking about an easy way to create this file ... I was thinking about ... repeating data structures and about easy maintenance of the data... and finally I though, OK, why not using my favorite standard tool - that is in 99.99% of the cases a solution ;) - MS EXCEL ;)
This is very simple to do with the "=Concatenate(cell01, cell02, cell03, ...)" build in function that can build text strings.... or several small and then one large XML string!!!
The advantages of this way to create the xml file is that you have a nice Excel Sheet and the cells with the data are separated from the cells with the xml tags. Moreover when you link the tag cells, you can always just change the names of the xml tags in one place. And the maintenance - in my case of the race track data - is very simple, because you can edit the data directly without searching in an endless xml string.
Anyhow, one picture says more than thousand words: Therefore here how it looks:
I have just uploaded my FormulaOneRaceTracks2007ByJoern.xls file. Basically you can just copy the cell "A2" and paste it into an empty editor and save it as a *.xml file. This should than look like my FormulaOneRaceTracks2007ByJoern.xml file.
If you need to create your own xml file, feel free to use my xls file as a starting point ;)
I found that this was a pretty easy way to create a XML file ;-)
And maybe what can save a lot of time is, when you "validate" your xml file FIRST, BEFORE you start using it with AJAX and getting error messages (because the xml file has bugs!!!).
A good validation service is for example validome.org. There you can choose as well, that your xml file is only validated concerning the "Well-Formedness". This is what I used and this is the validation result for my xml file.
Regarding my Mini-Project, you see, I have collected already all my data. Now the next step is to build and layout the page, where I can integrate this data.
-Joern