Sorry, about no explanation...

Right now I have a project where I am gathering information from about 20 forms, 1000+ fields and it’s all being stored in the session.

Moving forward I must take this information and dump into a temp db and no longer store or pass in session for multi pages.

Then pull the data put into a very long xml string and send the string to a middleware app to parse and commit to a central db.

Since the xml generator works like a champ and some of the complexities of the string, conditions on the data (required, not required, required when other data present etc.) makes using most standard read, turn into xml and so on not very friendly or useful. One reason is that one data filed in the db may have to go into 4 or 5 tags in several nodes.

I figure that since I can not use the session to hold the information as I do now, why can I just not call it out in the above example populate my xml generator then destroy the session when I send the xml. I empty the db when I get conformation that the data has been accepted.

Btw not a developer or programmer really. I am the Art Director for the company that I work for.

(I don't speak developer very well, and I have gone over the section that you directed me to, understood some, did not understand other parts of it. With 90 developers in the company NONE of them do web period. They are all C++, C#, TCL programers...)

I just happen to know a (1 to 10 scale a 5) bit about php. When the developer that spent 2 years, and could not get a properly formatted xml string to the middleware he was canned; The CEO told me that this is my new project...

In two months I have cleaned up a train wreck of code, and completed the first milestone of getting good data to the middleware and to the core db via this bloated xml schema that the business rule people came up with...