Re: [ubl-dev] Tools for database support for UBL?

[Duane Nickull <dnickull@adobe.com>]

Stephen:

Adobe has a set of tools that do this.  The product line is called 
LiveCycle.  The idea would be that you first use the Adobe Designer to 
design an PDF form with the fields you want to give write access to 
mutable.  When designing the form, you embed the UBL schema you want 
into the PDF form; this allows the ability to write our XML form output 
that is constrained by the schema. 

The second component is called Form Server.  Form server sits in a J2EE 
app server and exposes an interface from which the XML form instance 
data can be collected.  Once you have it inside the appserver 
environment, you can simply use the native JDBC functionality to insert 
into your DB.  Using the Designer product again, you could make a second 
form that is for the person responsible for processing the instance 
data.  This time, rather that using the XML schema for designing the 
form, you can select the data base and the form can import and build the 
form off of the database rows and columns.  All one needs to view the 
forms is the free Acrobat reader.

If you (or anyone else) wants the download coordinates and screen shots 
and a actual form, please email me offline (don't want to subject those 
on the list who are not interested)

Duane

Stephen Green wrote:

>Dear UBL-DEV, Hi
>
>If anyone has interest in the possibility of developing tools to help store UBL
>and UBL-based instances in a relational database I've been thinking along the 
>following lines:
>
>1. What sort of tables could UBL map to? What would be the relational mapping, say?
>
>2. Need to map Schemas to 'CREATE' SQL and develop a generator for that
>
>3. Need to map instances to 'UPDATE' SQL (etc ...?) and develop a generator for that
>
>I wonder if any have thoughts of devloping something like the above, perhaps as opensource
>or priced attractively to foster wider UBL / UBL-like Schema adoption (the key to successful
>use of UBL perhaps).
>
>What worries me is the complexity of UBL but there's the challenge and the drive I suppose.
>It would seem obvious to just treat every ABIE as a table and every document as an
>ABIE/table too. The relationships are where I get a bit lost.
>
>Another key factor would be to make the tools generic - to handle any Schemas built 
>by the UBL NDR rules and from the UBL spreadsheets (e.g. see UBLish from softml.com 
>which uses a scripting language similar to perl). 
>
>All the best
>
>Steve
>
>  
>

-- 
***********
Senior Standards Strategist - Adobe Systems, Inc. - http://www.adobe.com
Vice Chair - UN/CEFACT Bureau Plenary - http://www.unece.org/cefact/
Chair - OASIS eb SOA TC - http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ebsoa
***********