Advanced Functionality

As was the case with our XML to CSV Converter in Chapter 2, the CSV to XML Converter provides only some very basic functionality. There are several other things we might want such a converter to do.

• Reading several input XML documents to create 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 several logical documents in as one physical file.)

• Using Element names that are more semantically meaningful for specific applications (e.g., LastName instead of Column01).

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

• Supporting characters other than a comma for the column delimiter.

• Supporting characters other than a quotation mark for the text delimiter.

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