File Library

Oracle XSQL is part of the Oracle XML Developers Kit. It is also available as part of Oracle JDeveloper and web applications developed with JDeveloper, including an interface with Application Development Framework Business Components (ADF BC). In short, it allows you to output queries, PL/SQL web pages (OWA), and ADF BC View Objects as XML, transform that XML with XSLT, and even write reports with XSL-FO. It can import XML and parse it into columns and rows for insert into relational tables. It can process data from an HTML form as XML.

In this presentation I’ll examine XSQL’s capabilities in more detail. I’ll demonstrate some of the many ways it can be used, using JDeveloper as my development tool. I’ll show a web service I wrote where the bulk of the application is really a PL/SQL Server Page, but the presentation layer is an XSQL file. I’ll show a report that was originally written as part of a complete Web PL/SQL application, but most of the application is now written with ADF. We decided not to re-write the report, but integrate it into the ADF application with an XSQL page. Another report we have gets its data from the current contents of an ADF BC View Object. I’ll also show an XSQL page that generates a report from a straight SQL SELECT. As of the time of this writing, I have no examples of using XSQL to insert data into the database, but I hope to be able to demonstrate this as well.