Flexible user interface for converting relational data into XML

Abstract

This paper presents VIREX (VIsual RElational to XML) as a flexible user interface for converting a selected portion of a givenrelational database into XML. VIREX works even when the catalogue of the relational database is missing; it extracts the required catalogueinformation by analyzing the database content. From the catalogue information, whether available or extracted, VIREX derives and displayson the screen a graph similar to the entity-relationship diagram. VIREX provides a user-friendly interface to specify on the graph certain factorsto be considered while converting relational data into XML. Such factors include: 1) selecting the relations/attributes to be converted intoXML; 2) specifying a predicate to be satisfied by the information to be converted into XML; 3) deciding on the order of nesting between the relationsto be converted into XML. All of these are specified by a sequence of mouse clicks with minimum keyboard input. As a result, VIREX displayson the screen the XML schema that satisfies the specified characteristics and generates the XML documents from the relational database. Finally, VIREX helps in optimizing the amount of information to be transferred over a network. Also, it can be used to teach XML to beginners.