Advanced Functionality

As useful as this XML to CSV utility is, it's probably well suited only for a limited range of applications. A different XML to CSV converter would be helpful for dealing with the following real-life situations.

• Writing several input XML documents to a single physical output CSV file. (In the conventional way of doing things, an XML document is stored on disk as one physical file. However, most batch-oriented import facilities take in several logical documents as one physical file.)

• Performing data type conversions such as conversion from W3C XML Schema ISO 8601 date formats to formats such as MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY.

• Supporting a delimiter other than a comma.

• Avoiding the use of quotation marks around all text fields.

These form the start of the requirements list for the more capable utility we'll build in Chapter 7.