2012/1/24 Adam Tauno Williams
What you are describing is a classic use case of a workflow engine; numerous of which exist. Perhaps you should investigate using such a tool. Of course they are off-topic for an LXML list.
Ok, I am aware that there are many ways to do this, but why not with lxml and some python code? Dealing with another high level technology like BPML and whatever else it requires is just too much for me. It smells java which means big APIs, a lot of docs to dig into etc.
Most allow you to select data from an RDBMS or import from some type of file [flat, delimited, etc...] to XML. Then you can use XSLT, XPath, what-not, and export the data to a file or insert/upsert/update the data into an RDBMS.
And what you are talking about here is free, opensource etc? Regards P.