Version 1.1b Preview
- 2001 Sep 20

The upcoming version 1.1b of XPS will be featuring extensive refinement of all aspects of the language interpreter. Greater selector choices for extracting information about an XML internal DOM tree, such as number of body element nodes, text nodes, comment nodes, etc and other useful information will be supported.

What is more importantly, XPS v1.1b will be catering a list of SQL functions for seasoned and casual users of databases alike. In line with the ultimate aim of being a dynamic bridge in your data transformation needs, the provision of this set of ODBC-linked SQL functions will vastly enhance the reaches of XPS in data transformation, merging, format conversion, data extraction, updates, and in general, most data processing operations that in connection with your backend databases.

With these set of ODBC-linked SQL functions, the new upcoming v1.1b release of XPS will enable you to operate on databases in the form of
  1. SQL Servers from various vendors,
  2. Microsoft Access tables (.mdb files),
  3. Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets (.xls files),
  4. Microsoft Visual Foxpro (.vfp files),
  5. other ODBC-supported databases.
Extract data from these to form the desired XML document output, or take in XML document source from a file, standard input, or a piece of text from the database and make use of the native XML datatype to transparently parse the XML content into internally represented DOM tree. From there on, data extraction for update to databases will be a straight- forward process. Check out the database examples that come together with the new v1.1b release to convince yourself.