Visit us at Oracle OpenWorld next week!

Fall is here, which must mean we are off to San Francisco, CA for the 2012 Oracle OpenWorld show.  If you are planning on attending come by and see Altova at the Moscone center from Sept. 30^th – October 4^th in booth #3408 for a demo of Altova’s tools for Oracle Users and see the amazing new features in the newly released Altova MissionKit 2013!

While you are visiting our booth tell us about your latest projects and challenges, collaborate on best practices or let us show you some of the latest and greatest features available in MissionKit 2013, like Smart Fix XML Validation in XMLSpy, mapping SQL stored procedures in MapForce, watermark support in StyleVision, or our seamless integration options in Java applications.  Don’t forget to enter our drawing for a chance to win a free Altova MapForce Basic Edition license!

Stored Procedures in Database Mappings

In response to user requests, the new release of MapForce 2013 includes robust support for stored procedures in database mappings as:

• input components (for stored procedures that provide results)
• output components (for stored procedures that insert or update data in a database)
• or, stored procedures may be inserted as a function-like call (allowing users to provide input data, execute the stored procedure, and read/map the output data to other components)

The screenshot below shows the mapping of a stored procedure in SQL Server to create an XML file.

Altova MissionKit 2013 with Smart Fix

Altova Software Version 2013 was released today, and, as always, numerous features in this year’s autumn launch have been developed in response to customer requests. You asked for the ability to use SQL stored procedures in MapForce data mapping projects, to embed XSDs in WSDL documents in XMLSpy, to add watermarks in StyleVision, and to integrate MissionKit functionality flexibly in Java applications. All those features and more are there in Version 2013. We’ve also added some features that can only be described as magical.

Let’s take a look at the highlights…

Have you ever wanted a schema for Apache Ant?

Recently I was having some issues with the Ant files for a software project I was working on. I was editing one of them in XMLSpy but wasn’t getting entry help or code completion because I didn’t have a schema assigned to my script.

That seemed like a simple problem, so off I went looking for the schema.

I quickly found a Stack Overflow question looking for the same thing. The answer turns out to be, there is no Ant schema or DTD. The reasoning is straightforward. Above the challenge of making a flexible and comprehensive model of the Ant core, it would be able to include all the external tasks.

I immediately remembered that I’d been here before a couple years back, but this time I figured I’d use XMLSpy’s schema generation feature to try to do something about it…