In contrast to text files, XML-files contain all information of the chosen models. The name of each tag corresponds to the title of the respective list.
Because tag names must not contain special characters, these are suppressed during the export. |
In contrast to the other export functions, the export into an XML-file is also in the edit-dialog available. This gives you the possibility to export one model. Because the associated files (pictures, lists) get a unique name for each model, you can export different models into one folder. This function is optimal for the actualization of a second installation of this program.
If there are pictures for a model in the database, they will be saved into an extra file. The XML-file contains a link to this file.
Pictures are saved as an own file, because of the size of the XML-file. When importing an XML-file, the pictures must be in the same folder as the XML-file. |
All texts, which contains several lines and the notice field will be saved in a hex coded format. Only with this format it is sure to get the original text unchanged.
You can read an XML-file with all installations of this program. While importing, you can choose to overwrite existing models, or not.
With this feature, you have many possibilities. The easiest one is to transfer one or some models from one installation to another. Here, the export from the edit dialog may help you very much. Another idea is to add some information (e.g. parser for web-pages) to a model. For this, you have to export the model. Then an external program can read the XML-structure and add the new information. The last step is to reimport the XML-file.
A much more complex solution is the common administration of models for a club. A common database contains all models of all members. Each member administers his own models and exports the list into an XML-file. The administrator of the common database imports all XML-files of all members. So he gets a database with the models of all members. If a member changes something in his database, he exports the XML-file again. Because existing models will be recognized, the administrator of the common database can import the XML-file again.
For such a common database, it is a good idea to change the category name "owner" to the name of the member. |
Like the export into a text file, you can export the lists into an XML-file, too. The values will not be in list form, but as XML tags. Another program, with an XML-Interpreter, can import these data. The tag names of each column correspond to the heading name in the dialog.