[Tutor] MySQL -->Python-->XML for JSviz

[Kent Johnson]

Picio wrote:
> Hello all, I need some advice to choose an xml generator for jsviz a
> tool in javascript to create some wonderful graphs (SnowFlake or Force
> directed).
> 
> Starting from a SQL table (mysql) I need to create a XML file with a
> structure like this:
> <node root....>
>       <node id... text... ></node>
>       <node id... text... ></node>
>       <node id... text... ></node>
>                   <node id... text... ></node>
>                   <node id... text... ></node>
>       <node id... text... ></node>
> </node>
> 
> Where nodes attributes are the MySQL table fields (the PK will be the
> attribute).
> I know there are a lot of good tools to do this in pyhton (some maybe
> is already shipped with pyton itself), but since I need a lot of
> flexibility for the future I'd like to use an Object relational mapper
> like SQLAlchemy or SQLObject todo the job. When I say flexibility, I
> have in mind a solution to have multiple formats coming outside of the
> ORM:
> json, csv, plain text etc...

I'm not sure why you need an ORM here. ISTM you just need a database 
connection, the name of a table containing the data and a list of the 
fields you want to pull out of it. Then a simple SELECT gets you the 
data in a list of lists; pass the same list of field names and the list 
of data to whatever output formatter you want. I think the whole program 
would only be 20-30 lines of code.

ElementTree is a good XML package, it is part of Python 2.5 and 
available as an add-on for older Python versions.

Kent