Category: 11gR1, 11gR2

People who have attended the UKOUG presentation this year where Mark Drake, Sr. Product Manager XML Technologies / XMLDB, Oracle HQ, and I demonstrated the first principles of the XDB Repository, might have been impressed with its (GEO/KML Spatial, Image EXIF info) capabilities combined with Google Earth. This post will zoom in on how to consume automatically content of Windows Office document (docx).

Most (APEX) people know the PL/SQL Gateway functionality of the XDB Protocol Listener, but this is only one very small part of the XDB Repository functionality. To be precise only one “servlet” part of it. Those “servlets” can be based on Java, C or PL/SQL. The PL/SQL Gateway, as it’s name suggests, is based on the PL/SQL part. Another “servlet”, the Native Database Web Service (NDWS), which enables you to create a database SOA endpoint service and more, is based on C code. Beside demonstrating the WebDAV ACL driven security features and database extensibility/interfacing facilities based on the database (no cost option) XMLDB functionality, it also explain one of the coolest features, IMHO, introduced in Oracle 11gR1 called: XDB Repository Events.

There is one big problem in all of this. It is very, very sparsely documented and although there is some, or was some, code out there on the worldwide web, it took me a while to get a feeling of all the specifics at hand. This post will extend on some of the posts I already created to give to a head start of what is possible. This post will demonstrate what you can do with Windows Office documents, nowadays embedded (zipped) XML content, with extentions called: docx, xlsx or pptx…