Producing export files from MDriven Server

You can also write files by adding an action column called “savefile”; when the periodic action supervisor in MDrivenServer sees this action column it looks for two additonal columns; path and filename (case insensitive). If these are found the complete result of the ViewModel is streamed out as xml by using the ViewModelXMLUtils.GetDataAsXml method. The xml is then saved to path/filename.

Like this:

In a real world application it looked like this:

Notice that both path and filename are evaluated expressions, furthermore the Action UpdateExportTime is executed last – and it changes some data. Since the whole execution is wrapped in a memory transaction we make sure that we do not update the export time unless the file was written and everything is ok.

The resulting file looked like this:

Shaping and transforming export files

This SaveFile action has been updated to look for a column named xslt, if it is found the contents of the field is assumed to be a valid xslt transformation. The xml from the viewmodel is transformed with the xslt and the result is saved as above.

So if your xslt is…

<?xml version='1.0'?>
 <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'
 version='1.0'> <xsl:output method='text' omit-xml-declaration='yes'/> 
            <xsl:value-of select='ArticleNumber'/>,<xsl:value-of
 select='SalesArticleName'/>
        </xsl:template>
 </xsl:stylesheet>

… then your output would be…

NO101087,Cosmica Tygg 90 ST…

SQLExport serverside action

The SQLExport action is an action used to write data from your model into another external SQLdatabase. It is an alternative way to export data – way to needs no other external components or maintenance than what MDriven Server provides.

SQLExport requires 'connectionstring' on root, 'data' as a Nesting that contains the datarow(s) to insert or update and on data - 'queryforinsert','queryforupdate' and 'queryforselectcount' as attributes (if queryforselectcount returns 0 the queryforinsert is used, else update).

Update 2018-10-18: you can now use 'connectionstringodbc' and the logic will use ODBC connection instead.

The very common case of “replicating” some model driven data to another database is implemented and scheduled in minutes.