On the fly DB conversion

[WertmanTheMad]

Hello all Im crossposting this to XML but since I cant decide where it
should be asked here goes....

I had a project cross my desk today , nothing special but lots of XML
work, sort of.

What I need to be able to do is grab a file from the web (user
uploaded to me) It could be Access Excel CSV DBase or a couple of
others (XBase VFP FMPro), what I need to do is export that to XML ,
the hink Is I dont know how its going to be coming in (as far as field
arrangment) I should for the most part be able to determine that
progromatically using regular expressions as they are address fields ,
first name last name address zip etc, but they could come in any
order.

I also wont know how many fields are coming in, is there a way I can
do this will OLEDB and dump it into a temp table ?

So what is the best way to convert these databases directly to XML

OR

Is it better to convert them to an interm format (CSV) and then use
something like XmlCsvReader to export it to XML ?

What are some good tools to do the initial DB conversion to CSV ? I
preffer free tools with source (hey I've got a UNIX background

Everything is going to be written in VB.NET (2.0 if there are things
in 2.0 that will make my life easier)

Many thanks

Chris

 

[Joe Fallon]

I wrote something like this a while back.
Just import the files to a DataSet and then save that back to XML.

I used the OLEDB Provider for Jet with Access and Excel.
I wrote a class to handle CSV and Fixed Width text files.
dBase and Foxpro were also fairly simple.