Hey Mark,

The thought has certainly crossed my mind. I've played with the idea a little bit, and exporting some type of structure schema along with the XML data would not be all that difficult.

Now, that would definitely make importing the PMA XML far easier (and more accurate, naturally) but there are still many other formats where such a setup is not feasible. Mainly, all formats that are external from PMA where the presence of such a structure cannot be guaranteed. I.E. ODS, Excel, CSV, etc.

I'll plan on making the necessary alterations to the XML export plug-in to make importing XML much more efficient, but it seems to me that the type/size-detection algorithm (in some incarnation) will still need to be present for those other formats.

If anyone has any insight that they would like to offer, please let me know.

-Derek Schaefer

On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 08:43 -0400, Marc Delisle wrote:

Hi, I had a quick look at Derek's current state of XML import plug-in which tries to detect column types based on values.

I think that the original problem about this, is that phpMyAdmin's XML export does not have the option of exporting structure, data or both.

I'm not sure how people are currently importing phpMyAdmin's XML output but I believe we could change the export format to handle our importing needs.