SQL Server & XML Forms

If you are in a hurry and can’t build heavyweight rich user interface forms, (like VB6.0 forms) then you can uses a combination of XSL, XHMTL, and update grams.

Tricky parts:

1. Set up the virtual directories per BOL. Try :

.../myVirtualDirectory?sql=SELECT * FROM myTable&root=sometagname

If your leave out the root part, you won’t get a valid XML document back. 2. To get the xml back transformed, you have to put it in a ‘updategram’ with the following in the root tag:

`xmlns:sql='urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xml-sql'

sql:xsl='myStyleSheet.xsl'` 3. You have to put call your update grams like this:

myupdategram.xml?contenttype=text/html

If you don’t the browser ignores the META tag & treats the document as XML. 4. The XML document you get back from a successful update is blank. If not, you get a processing instruction- which is hard to transform into a pretty XHTML document. This kind of match will show the error message, but not clean it up.

`<xsl:template match='processing-instruction()'>

<xsl:value-of select="."/>`