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April 15, 2002

Outputing a Filemaker DB in XML

This URL lets me get at a Filemaker DB and output it in XML:

http://127.0.0.1:8100/simple/fmpro?-db=books.fp5&-format=-dso_xml&-max=5&-find=&

Returns:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
- <FMPDSORESULT xmlns="http://www.filemaker.com/fmpdsoresult">
  <ERRORCODE>0</ERRORCODE>
  <DATABASE>books.fp5</DATABASE>
  <LAYOUT />
- <ROW MODID="0" RECORDID="1">
  <title>Physics of Baseball</title>
  <isbn>0-155-2558-225</isbn>
  <comment>This is a good book</comment>
  </ROW>
- <ROW MODID="0" RECORDID="2">
  <title>XTML: The best</title>
  <isbn>05-88554-48525-255</isbn>
  <comment>This is also very good</comment>
  </ROW>
- <ROW MODID="0" RECORDID="3">
  <title>The Stand</title>
  <isbn>78-4185-11</isbn>
  <comment>My books</comment>
  </ROW>
  </FMPDSORESULT>

So I can use Filemaker to maintain my list of books, query it to get an XML file, and then use XSL or something else to format up a nice looking page than I can drop in this weblog.  I could also drop the XML itself into the Radio WWW directory and have it stream up to the server, for whatever that's worth.

And if there was a real DTD that I want to stay current with, I guess I could also use XSL to convert my Filemaker XML to that form.

It all sounds great, but it means I have some work to do; I'm only familar with most of these technologies by name alone.