Moving XML files

amax

Hi All, I have a weekly folder of XML news stories with a fieldset saying:

What I would like to do is loop through this folder and move each XML file depending on the attributes in the one line above e.g. If story chanel = news then create a new folder called News and move the file there, renaming the xml file general.xml

I will also have to transform the XML file with XSLT.
Could someone please advise me on the best way to go about starting the above?

Kind Regards
amax

etully

The solution you are asking for requires a script (using cron to trigger something like a shell script or a PHP script) to literally move the file to another directory and then a script to use XSLT to transform the XML. This is somewhat clumsy and difficult because you have so many technologies and lots of places for things to break.

In my opinion, this task is much more easily handled by making both the original XML file and general.xml be generated by PHP.

Make a MySQL table that contains news stories with a flag that indicates the date that it should be "moved" to the general.xml file.

Then, in your original XML file, make some code that looks like this:

<?php
// connect to database
// select all general news stories where the date flag is greater than today
// Loop through results:
?>
<story channel="News" topic1="general">
// display their contents
</story>
<?php // end loop
?>

And then make a general.xml file that does exactly the same thing but shows the news stories where the date is LESS than today (that is, in the past, and therefore, "transferred" to the general.xml file.

In the database, each news story could also have a field that indicates the topic (general, entertainment, programming, hardware, etc, whatever). This field can be used so that PHP can generate the XML appropriately.

With this model, you don't need XSLT to do any transformation. You're not really moving any files. You're just making each file display what's in the database it the files will automatically change when the story's expiration date arrives.

amax

etully, thank you so much for your reply. It makes perfect sense what you are saying to have it all in a MySQL database. Unfortunately though, I cant use a database as the XML files are given to me and outside my control. I suppose however I could move the XML files into a database and read it from there. That would be great, but would require a massive change to the sites updating process each week. Thus, only way possible for me at this stage is to move and transform them I think. I have come up with a successful script since this morning though that does my job perfectly using the copy function and simplexml_load_file which works a treat e.g. snippet:


if (  (string) $xml->channel == 'news'  && (string) $xml->page_type == 'general'  ) {

if (!copy($article, $news_general)) {
echo "failed to copy $article...\n"; }

Only thing I need to do now is loop through the new directory the xml files were renamed and copied to with a php script, and transform them into .shtml pages. I would like to use a separate script to do this. Can anyone advise on this one ?. I took a quick look at creating a .xsl file for the first time ever this evening and it worked fine when I displayed the XML file in a browser, but problem is that I need the extension to be .shtml and not .xml.
Am I missing somethign here that transforms the XML file into a completely new .shtml page or .php page, completely removing the XML or am I totally lost here?

Weedpacket

amax wrote:
Only thing I need to do now is loop through the new directory the xml files

[man]glob/man will give you an array of the names of all the .xml files in the current directory.

amax wrote:
but problem is that I need the extension to be .shtml and not .xml.

The file extension is entirely under your control when you create the transformed file; it's simply part of the name. (Of course, you can also [man]rename[/man] files if you need to.)