Altova Tamino Integration - what a joke!

Hello,

I’m not the one to usually vent on newsgroups, but I couldn’t help myself.

We have purchased XMLSpy ver 5.0 in 2003. It never worked right and is quite buggy. This year I had more time to try XMLSpy out. I downloaded the newest XMLSpy 2004, and even the plug in into Visual Studio .NET.

Guess what? Tamino integration STILL doesn’t work properly! The biggest issue I have is that I wanted to use XMLSpy to create a quick query, retrieve my document, modify it and save it back. A BASIC update. However, no matter what I tried, XMLSpy will always insert the modified document as a NEW document, it will not update the old one. I have contacted the tech support and they have confirmed that this is a bug. What really gets me is that this has been a bug for at LEAST a year! Maybe even more. I don’t think they plan to fix it anytime soon.

Also their VS integration crashes so often, that it is utterly useless. Once again, those issues were confirmed by the techstaff at Altova.

All in all, XMLSpy is a great product, but not if you want to use it in conjunction with Tamino. I can’t believe nobody mentioned this on any of the newsgroups here, since this is a very old issue.

Peter

Hi Peter,

storage and updates are working very seemless with Tamino.
But you have to use what’s called ‘Plain URL Addressing’
(for further information see the ‘X-Machine Programming’
section in the Tamino documentation).

The concept behind is that Tamino is perfectly embeddable into
an internet environment, what means that you can address resources
within Tamino in the same way as you address resources on any
web server. This means

a) using a HTTP-GET to retrieve a resource (XML-document, nonXML-resource)
b) using a HTTP-PUT to store a resource.

and that’s what you can do with XMLSpy in a very easy fashion.

Suppose you have a document with doctype ‘report’ stored with
an ino:id 333 (implicit database key for your document,
assigned by Tamino) or alterativley with the ino:docname ‘mydoc.xml’.
Second suppose your Tamino Database URL is ‘http://myhost/tamion/mydb/reportCollection

So as URL-Resource location you can use the following URLs:

http://myhost/tamion/mydb/reportCollection/report/@333’ (using the ino:id as identifier)
http://myhost/tamion/mydb/reportCollection/report/mydoc.xml’ (using the docname)

Just use the ‘Open from URL’ or ‘Save to URL’ functions in XMLSpy and
you can easily update XML content in Tamino. This works with any XMLSpy
version back to 3.x

Best regards,

Matthias.