Design question - capturing data

Again...work instruction xml:

Say you have a <step> element (which is primarily text) with a child element
<measure> that is a text box for user input.

<step>
   <measure>
   </measure>
</step>

...and of course, you could have several of these for any given work
instruction instance.

What is the best way (or possible ways) to identify each "field" in/out of a
database?

Of course, my head is still in relational db land, but I've seen references
to generate-id or using a "hard-coded" @name for each <measure> element.

Same issue for things such as: for each <step> capture start/stop times but
how to refer to each in a db WITHOUT hard-coding each reference?

Am I making ANY sense with this question?

TIA, Kathy


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