If you are a software engineer then most likely you subscribe to a number of email lists, or get regular daily / periodical email updates that can clog up your email inbox. Also most likely you use Outlook, connected via POP to download your email, and have a myriad of rules that move messages into folders to keep everything as organized as possible.

Note: This post was originally written about 3 years ago (my XML knowdledge is significantly better now, I promise) but always stored as a draft, never finished nor published. In fact, I forgot it existed until I switched over to WordPress and imported all my Movable Type entries into WordPress. Given I have not used the Clarion development environment at all in well over 2 years I cannot vouch for it’s accuracy with relation to current Clarion releases. I will however publish it now as it may help someone, somewhere, despite being incomplete.

A large part of my job is to work with a development environment called Clarion, by SoftVelocity. Despite its many problems, Clarion is a fantastic tempalted RAD tool that has native database drivers for a large amount of databases, and ODBC access to the rest. Recently a spec was approved that requires the transform of some of our data from our Time in Attendance program to a XML supported by a Payroll System.