Re: Storing XSL Documents In Database

["Steve Muench" <smuench at us dot oracle dot com>]

| I have a need to store many xsl/xml documents in a 
| database and would like to know what the best solution
| everyone has found is.  I am using Oracle 8i on Solaris,
| and Java.

Assuming you don't *want* to break down the templates
into their own tables (for perhaps doing some dynamic
assembly of the right set of templates based on
runtime personalization info), just storing entire
XML documents as is with Oracle8i your best options are:

   -> CLOB  (Character Large OBject)
   -> BFILE (Reference to an external file)

Both of these types support streaming input and output
interfaces in JDBC. The big difference is that the CLOB
is updateable and stored *in* the database and can be
XML-Search indexed (might not be something you want
to do on Stylesheets, but...) while the BFILE is a 
read-only reference to a file on the external filesystem.

You can read a CLOB from a table like...

  public static CLOB read(Connection conn,
                          String tableName,
                          String colName,
                            String idCol,
                               int idVal) throws Exception {

    PreparedStatement p = conn.prepareStatement("SELECT " + colName   +
                                                "  FROM " + tableName +
                                                " WHERE " + idCol     + "= ?");
    p.setInt(1,idVal);
    OracleResultSet rs = (OracleResultSet)p.executeQuery();
    rs.next();
    CLOB theClob = rs.getCLOB(1);
    rs.close();
    p.close();

    return theClob;
  }

And parse an XML document from a clob like:

  public static XMLDocument read( CLOB theClob ) throws Exception {

    // Create an oracle.xml.parser.v2.DOMParser 
    DOMParser theParser = new DOMParser();

    // Get the input stream from the CLOB
    Reader in = theClob.getCharacterStream();

    // Parse the document from the stream
    theParser.parse(in);
    in.close();

    // Get the parsed XML Document from the parser
    return theParser.getDocument();

  }

__________________________________________________________
Steve Muench, Lead XML Evangelist / Consulting Product Mgr
Oracle Corp, Business Components for Java Development Team
http://technet.oracle.com/tech/xml




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