VIREX: visual relational to XML conversion tool

Developing user-friendly transformation tools for converting all or part of a given relational database into XML has not received enough consideration. This paper presents a flexible user interface called VIREX (VIsual RElational to XML), which facilitates converting a selected portion of a given underlying relational database into XML. VIREX works even when the catalogue of the underlying relational database is missing. For the latter case, VIREX extracts the required catalogue information by analyzing the underlying database content. From the catalogue information, whether available or extracted, VIREX derives and displays on the screen a graph similar to the entity-relationship diagram. VIREX provides a user-friendly interface to specify on the graph certain factors to be considered while converting relational data into XML. Such factors include: (1) selecting the relations/attributes to be converted into XML; (2) specifying a predicate to be satisfied by the information to be converted into XML; (3) deciding on the order of nesting between the relations to be converted into XML. All of these are specified by a sequence of mouse clicks with minimum keyboard input. As a result, VIREX displays on the screen the XML schema that satisfies the specified characteristics and generates the XML document from the underlying relational database. Finally, VIREX is essential to optimize the amount of information to be transferred over a network by giving the user the flexibility to specify the amount of relational data to be converted into XML. Also, VIREX can be used to teach XML to beginners.