semi-easy question

[Stephen Huey]

This will seem really simple to most of you--I just want to make sure I'm doing this right. I'm sending customers a simple XML notification of shipments, and currently it looks like this:

<Shipment>
  <OrderID>2373897</OrderID>
  <Total>12.95</Total>
</Shipment>

I would like to give customers the ability to pull their shipment history for a particular date or date range, and if I group all the shipments for a given date within that date, I'm wondering how you specify the date's value--is it like this:

<ShipmentHistory>
  <Date>
    <DateValue>10052003</DateValue>
    <Shipment>
      <OrderID>210230</OrderID>
      <Total>9.99</Total>
    </Shipment>
  </Date>
  <Date>
    <DateValue>10082003</DateValue>
    <Shipment>
      <OrderID>2373897</OrderID>
      <Total>12.95</Total>
    </Shipment>
    <Shipment>
      <OrderID>2379832</OrderID>
      <Total>15.23</Total>
    </Shipment>
  </Date>
</ShipmentHistory>   

Something seems a little bit wrong with the date and datevalue...
Thanks!

[Balaji Loganathan]

Something like this ??

<ShipmentHistory>
  <Date Value="10052003" >
    <Shipment>
      <OrderID>210230</OrderID>
      <Total>9.99</Total>
    </Shipment>
  </Date>
  <Date Value="10082003" >
    <Shipment>
      <OrderID>2373897</OrderID>
      <Total>12.95</Total>
    </Shipment>
    <Shipment>
      <OrderID>2379832</OrderID>
      <Total>15.23</Total>
    </Shipment>
  </Date>
</ShipmentHistory>   

Or

<ShipmentHistory>
<DateRange From="10052003" To="10082003" >
  <Date Value="10052003" >
    <Shipment>
      <OrderID>210230</OrderID>
      <Total>9.99</Total>
    </Shipment>
  </Date>
  <Date Value="10082003" >
    <Shipment>
      <OrderID>2373897</OrderID>
      <Total>12.95</Total>
    </Shipment>
    <Shipment>
      <OrderID>2379832</OrderID>
      <Total>15.23</Total>
    </Shipment>
  </Date>
</DateRange>
</ShipmentHistory>   

does it make sense ??

[Stephen Huey]

Yeah, I guess that should be ok. It's just that I've read that sometimes you might not want to have data in an attribute (like having the date value be an attribute of the date tag), so I wasn't sure how to handle it otherwise. But if that's pretty typical, I guess I could use it. I suppose another way I could do it would be like this:

<Shipment>
  <Date>10092003</Date>
  <Order>3274890</Order>
  (etc)
</Shipment>