Tool to maintain a Data Mapping between two systems

Question

We have XML interfaces between multiple systems. An Enterprise Domain Model is missing in the overall architecture, hence the terms Product/Customer/User means different things to different systems.

We currently use excel sheets to map the elements in incoming XML to what the actual Field means within our system. Additionally, it contains the values of Mandatory/Optional and length of each field. We call this the Data Dictionary.

Any changes to the XML go through rounds of deliberation and updates to Word and Excel documents.

Is there a better way to do this? Any tool/GUI based approach which all systems and owners can view?

Answer 1

XSLT is the normal way to map one XML to another. I can't directly recommend it (I prefer text editors for my XSLT, and use programming abstractions rather than visualisations to manage complexity) but colleagues have seemed happy with stylusstudio . Try it and see.