Dear Loft01,
As I understand your request, you would like to build a system which
can take your music track metadata currently stored in Excel xls files
and transform it into the xml import formats required by the various
stores. You would like to continue to use Excel xls files to edit and
store the data, and would like to convert the data to an import format
each time it is needed.
Each of the stores has a different import format. The formats differ
not only in what information is required, but also in how the
information is broken up into fields, and how the fields are encoded.
For example, in your Finetunes xls format, people in the same role are
separated by semicolons in the same field, while in Rhapsody format
each person is in a separate xml element. Examples of different
encodings include dates, durations, genres, and territories.
Therefore it is not practical to create a simple direct map between
fields; instead, a converter for each import format is needed.
From your reference to the Altova tool, I understand you are
interested in using xml standard languages such as XSLT or XQuery.
For this project I would use XQuery for the XML converters, since the
project involves gathering tracks of an album, and writing some string
manipulation functions to convert data formats. This project also
needs a way to convert the xls files to and from an xml data format.
A simple converter is easy to build with the Apache POI library in
java, and then the more complex xml transformations can be done in
XQuery. New xml import formats can be added with additional XQuery
files. (The transformations can be reversed by writing XQuery files
to do the inverse conversion and converting the result to xls; again,
the formats are too different to make this a simple inverse mapping of
fields.)
Regards,
Grammal