Re: Reading a XML document embeeded in a logfile

James Grimm (james_grimm@credence.com)
Mon, 19 Oct 1998 07:22:11 -0700


Richard Tobin wrote:
>
> > I can introduce a root element called Logfile and append all the documents
> > as a child. But whenever I append a XML document I have to reposition
> > the pointer to rewrite XML document root tag.
>
> I don't know if it would work in your particular case, but you might
> be able to avoid this by having the document consist of something
> like this:
>
> <!DOCTYPE logfile [
> <!ENTITY logentries SYSTEM "logentries">
> ]>
> <logfile>&logentries;</logfile>
>
> and appending elements to the logentries external entity rather than
> to the logfile itself.

I really like this solution (and pardon me if I reuse the idea), but
there is still the little problem of locking the "logentries" file. The
logentries file won't be well-formed, even with this wrapper, if the
parser reads the logfile while another thread/program is adding a new
log_entry. Anybody know of any tools to help with locking sections of
an xml document? I suppose it wouldn't be too difficult to add
transaction concepts on top of a DOM implementation. Perhaps a nice
tool vendor has already done this? Any other ideas?

-James