Update & Documentation Submitted

[Week 31]

These past two weeks I've been very busy with the project and finishing off continuous assessment projects.

I started by looking at my method for generating the JTree. While taking Martin's comments on board I came up with a new method for constructing the tree correctly. This was great as I could then produce correct XPath expressions.

I moved onto to integrating Martin's code for querying. I learned about the SQL packages and classes that come with Java. More specifically which object to instantiate for passing an SQL statement, sending that to the database and collecting the results. This works well now and was a big milestone as I had then achieved all basic functionality with the project.

The meeting with Mark on Thursday was good as he gave some good suggestions on how to improve on what I had done. They were:
- Show before and after times (how my querying performs over eXist)
- Introduce the ability to specify a predicate on a node
- Introduce support for more datasets

I have managed to get basic predicates working. So a user may select a node, e.g. name and actually specify a name.

Martin provided me with lots more datasets. All XML files so I needed to write the schemas for these. I managed to complete this today. I may need to look into support attributes.

Submitted my Technical Specification, User Manual and Sample Code on Friday so good to get all that out of the way. I forgot to attach a print out of this blog, hopefully that will not be a problem. I'll contact GK tomorrow.

That's about it for now. It's time to focus on exams!

Update on progress with XSOM

[Week 29]

I managed to parse some XML schema files with XSOM, produce a tree and XPath expressions this week so decided it was good time to meet with MOC again.

He informed me that the tree I was producing was not fully correct for the XML schema I was using. Therefore I need to look at my parsing method again and adapt it correctly. If the tree is incorrect then it will produce incorrect XPath expressions. Therefore it is critical that I get this method correct.

We did discuss the next stages in detail and Martin has written code to insert XML documents into a relational database in a specialised way. He also has code to query the relational database. As part of my project specification I do not insert any data into a relational database. I do, however query it. Therefore I will use his Index Builder program to insert some XML documents into the database and integrate his query program with mine so that the XPath expressions produced from my program can be used to query the data.

I have arranged a meeting with MR for Thursday this coming week to go over the project so my next post will discuss how the integration of Martin's code went and the outcome of the meeting with MR.