Webmaster Forum / ASP / Database Access / March 2007

Hi All

Can I use an XML file like I could a database, ie select, insert, update and
delete from it?

If so, how would one do this via standard ASP calls?

If you can't use SQL-style commands how do you use it for storing info?

The reason I ask is that I need a few params storing on a central site and
then other site pull these params remotely.  For example, I have one site
that maintains a list of available web site 'skins'.  New skins are added,
existing ones updated and deleted via a standard form on a web page and
these changes need to be stored to an XML file rather than a DB such as
MySQL.

As and when a user goes on one of the form pages on the remote sites, the
remote site will then extract these params from this primary XML file.

Another thing to ask is that I want to provide users with the ability to
backup their web site text content without simply giving them the tables to
my database.  My plan was to extract the data into an XML file, but not too
sure how you do it.  Would I simply build up the file, eg:

<CODE>IVP</CODE>
<DESC>Invoice Paper</DESC>
etc...

and save it into a text file with the suffix of .xml?

How would I then extract this info back out of the file so that I could
update a 'clean' database with it?

Thanks