New Message: Re: Getting a value from an XML table

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Address: http://frontier.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$8980

By: Kevin Drennan (kevin at santafe.edu)

Brian,

Thanks for the reply. xml.getAttributeValue was the right call. I can get to that all important recordid now.

You asked about my Filemaker project.

Here at SFI we've got a data base with about a thousand scientific papers in it. Up until now I've been maintaining separate web pages that list the papers by year as well as an individual page for each paper's abstract.

Our site is statically rendered from Frontier and served by Apache so I always had this problem of being able to tie Frontier to FMP via the object model while I had Apache, PHP, and other tools on the server side. Once I started playing around with XML-RPC, I realized it had the potential to tie my Apache/PHP environment to my Frontier/FMP environment. The fact that FMP 5 speaks XML is no small detail either and, in general, XML transactions seem to be quicker than going the object model route.

What I've got now is a wptext object in my Frontier guest data base that can be run through all of the functionality of the web framework but the content of the page is a PHP XML-RPC client script. Since this page lives in the guest DB, its place in the nextPrev list and thus the navigation scheme is preserved when it's rendered to Apache. When this page is requested by a client, the PHP XML-RPC client is invoked and it calls a script on my Frontier server with the various search parameters. Frontier builds a URL and sends it as an http request to FMP's built in web server. FMP returns an XML document which my script complies into a table. The table is then parsed to create the HTML I want and then that's returned to the PHP client.

Three web servers working together to produce a page thanks to XML-RPC and it's really pretty fast. I need to streamline my scripts but you can bet I'll be doing a lot more of this kind of thing. We've got a lot of information in FMP that I want to use on the web.

Thanks for the interest and feel free to send any questions or comments. I'm still smoothing out the rough edges.

Kevin

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