Large XML documents

folks,

silly question -

Is it better to have one large xml file with multiple entries (nodes) for all my news articles

OR

should I have mutliple XML files, each containing ONE news article? In this senario, each XML file will have the same construction, but the advantage will be that it will not get as big.

I am worried about my XML file becoming unmanageably big if I keep everything in one file.

Also are there any speed considerations?

Thanks
Leila

Hi ya

This realy depends on the application. From the sounds of it if you are going to have a huge XML file after a while. Any text parsing of large files is slow even with an ID for an event driven program to read. As when someone reads a news article they will have to make a file request anyway I think it is probably best to use one XML file for each article.

I am developing a profile system that uses MySql to verify users with passwords etc but then has an ID that is the file name of the XML file for all the profile data. This way I can have a huge members database with very little server resoucre. The benefit of this is that with Data Islands all the Profile data is on the clients PC and no further server side processing is required!

Hope this helps

Trev

Trev,

Many thanks for your answer. Yes my xml document is expected to grow quite large (albeit not very quickly). The other consideration is that I cannot use server side processing as our customer will not allow any custom code on their servers. So I must do everything client side. This means that whenever I want to display a single news article, I must download the entire XML document to the client, and then pass the primarykey of the news article to be displayed to the xslt file, and do the transformation client side. Could get very slow.

Great pity, since I just found a great way to pass primary keys into the XSLT.

Thanks anyway!