Newsletter Purpose: This is the periodic newsletter of Zetein Inc. offering insights into current standards and technology topics. This letter also serves as a means of staying in touch with you. Here are the major topics covered this edition:
The ACORD standards are used to interface between trading partners or between systems within one trading partner. One interface that has not been used much, but, which is very useful is to use the ACORD standard transactions as a conversion tool to a new system.
Many commercially available systems now accept ACORD transactions. Consider using an ACORD download transaction to convert from your existing system to your new one. If the transactions are processed as you would process any new business transaction, you achieve several advantages. You get all of the same edits you would get for any new business case. Your support files and tables in the new system must be complete to do the conversion.
Since any translation from and to ACORD standards already exist, you avoid the mapping problem that is the biggest concern of any new system implementation.
If you would like me to discuss this topic in more depth or other topics in future newsletters, please let me know.
We are going to explore some basics of DOM processing using Visual Basic >NET in this letter. Here is a sample Visual Basic .NET program to do essentially the same as the last newsletter did using XSLT.
(1) open Visual Studo .Net. (2) Start a visual basic Windows project. (3) Under the project menu select "add module" (4) Copy the visual basic module below over the new module (5) Under the project menu select "properties" and make "Sub Main" as the Startup Project. (6) copy the XML document from before ( or copy it from below) into the "newProject\bin" directory (7) Under the debug menu select "Start" (8) Review results
Here is the XML file we used in the last letter. The name is NameSample.xml.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet
type="text/xsl" href="NameSample2Flat.xsl"?><!--
this ties the files together -->
<Party>
<Name>John Meagher</Name>
<Phone>469.374.0984</Phone>
<Address>BX 741083</Address>
<City>Dallas</City>
<State>TX</State>
<ZipCode>75374</ZipCode>
</Party>
Here is the visual basic module that you will copy:
Imports System.IO
Imports System.Xml
Module Test
Dim DomDoc As New XmlDocument
Dim FileName As String
Sub Main()
Dim Name As String
Dim Add As String
Dim CityStateZip As String
Dim Phone As String
FileName = System.IO.Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + "\NameSample.xml"
DomDoc.Load(FileName)
Name = getKeyValue("/Party/Name")
Add = getKeyValue("/Party/Address")
CityStateZip = getKeyValue("/Party/City") + " " _
+ getKeyValue("/Party/State") + " " _
+ getKeyValue("/Party/ZipCode")
Phone = getKeyValue("/Party/Phone")
MsgBox("Name: " + Name + vbNewLine _
+ "Address: " + Add + vbNewLine _
+ "City State Zip: " + CityStateZip + vbNewLine _
+ "Phone: " + Phone + vbNewLine)
End Sub
Private Function getKeyValue(ByVal aNode As String) As String
Dim node As XmlNode
Try
node = (DomDoc.DocumentElement).SelectSingleNode(aNode)
Catch e As Exception
node = Nothing
End Try
If node Is Nothing Then Return ""
Return node.InnerText
End Function
End Module
Visual basic will format the program after you have copied it into the module.
Were you successful?
The process is to load the XML document into a Document Object Model (DOM). You then traverse the tree to find the items you want. I used a subroutine to find the needed items but visual basic did the traversing internally.
If you saved the last newsletter notice the differences in how items are referenced.
We will look at the "how to" of java and Sax in the next newsletter.
If you would like me to discuss this topic in more depth or other topics in future newsletters, please feel free to contact me.
As you begin 2004, consider our consulting services to implement the ACORD standards project you need done. We can help in many ways; training your developers, design tasks and implementation.
We have extensive experience in insurance, XML, and ACORD standards.
Visit our website (http://www.zeteininc.com/) for more details, then please call (469.374.0984) or email me ( jmeagher@zeteininc.com) to explore how we can help with your ACORD project.
Thanks, John Meagher
▲ Zetein Inc BX 741083 Dallas TX 75374
If you do not wish any future emails, please reply to this email with "Remove" in the subject line.