appropriate use of xsl?

Hi all,

I am struggling with how to solve this problem. I am wondering if I am
using xsl as my one and only hammer.

I have n number of tables, that are all very similar, but in some way
different.  Column names may mismatch.  The date in one table me be in
mm/dd/yyyy, while another may be in yyyy/mm/dd.

I need to display the union of these tables in a homogenous way.  That is,
if I have a column called "order date", i need to display
table1.order_date and table2.orderdate, and in a consistent date format.

One idea I had was to define one standard dtd that would be the format I 
would pass to my application.  I would create an xml file for each
different format, and to define how each attribute would map to the
standard defined in a dtd.  I would use xsl to do the transformation to
the standard format, and to do the data conversion...

Summary:
1) convert the jdbc resultset to an xml file
2) create dtd for the common xml file format
3) create a xsl file for each of the distinct formats that I encounter to
transform them to the common format

I would be interested in hearing any thoughts on this.
Thank you,
Phillip


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