Steve Taylor

Exactly. It's a bit of a shame to have to do it that way, but that's the way it is.

The diagram is just to show the fact that if you do a three-level export, the results aren't grouped according to the parent field, as they are if you do a two-level one. I'm talking about tab-delimited or Excel type exports here. I was getting a bit put off by that fact. But you're quite right; XSLT should be able to handle the FMPXMLRESULT output, however many levels of relationship you're exporting. I shall persist if I need to do one of those. Thanks again.

Do you mean about the export, or the possibility of parsing the data? The export, from table A including related records from table B and C ought to be like this: A A/B1 B1/C1 B1/C2 B1/C3 A/B2 B2/C1 B2/C2 A/B2 B3/C1 B3/C2 but is in fact like this: A A/B1 B1/C1 A/B2 B1/C2 A/B2 B1/C3 B2/C1 B2/C2 B3/C1 B3/C2 making me think that it won't work with a three-level export.

Well, this is great, and I'm immensely grateful. I have noticed that this seems to be impossible when you have three levels of relationship- ie Table A, related to Table B, itself related to Table C: if you do an export from A involving records from A, B and C, the values come out in the wrong order, so the stylesheet can't do its thing. For the benefit of anyone else reading this would you agree that the generic stylesheet is this: <?phpxml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> xmlns:fmp="http://www.filemaker.com/fmpxmlresult" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" exclude-result-prefixes="fmp"> ... ... Where X "parenttagnameN" is the tag you want to put on a field from the parent table and "childtagnameN" is the tag name you want to put on a field form the related records, and X is the number of the first column in the export that comes form the related table. No need to know the field names of the export, just their positions in the output.

That's fantastic- it works fine. Dare I ask how I'd extend it to cope with more columns? (ie if I start exporting more than just two related fields)? <?phpxml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> xmlns:fmp="http://www.filemaker.com/fmpxmlresult" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" exclude-result-prefixes="fmp"> By any chance? BTW I do completely agree it would be better to export from the edits directly but I've been asked to do it this way...

OK. I'll get down to the nitty-gritty. I'm dealing with media (video) files, and want to export the editing data for many records all at once, in a nice nested XML structure. Each video has a number (called idHouse in the example) and associated edits which will have a start timecode, and possibly an end timecode. If I export the records for one idHouse, I get this, in tab-format: 90407 10:00:43:24 10:01:45:13 10:04:15:04 10:04:15:05 10:05:47:01 10:09:40:21 10:11:22:05 10:11:22:06 10:17:01:17 10:17:01:18 10:23:41:18 90407 is the idHouse, and there are 8 edits, three of which have both a start and end timecode. If I export the same stuff as FMPXMLRESULT, I get this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 0 90407 10:00:43:2410:01:45:1310:04:15:0410:05:47:0110:09:40:2110:11:22:0510:17:01:1710:23:41:18 10:04:15:0510:11:22:0610:17:01:18 I put some CRs into that to make it easier to read- as you can see the 1st is the idHouse value (the parent record) and the other 2 s are the start and end timecode values. Using this XSLT stylesheet to parse the FMPXMLRESULT on the way out: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" exclude-result-prefixes="fmp"> I get this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 90407 10:00:43:24 In other words, the export with all the related records but the first ignored. But the related records are all there in the FMPXMLRESULT; it's just that my stylesheet isn't clever enough to get them out. It seems to me that I'm going to have to rewrite it with some kind of nested structure, so maybe that "" needs to be something different, but nothing I've tried so far works. Incidentally the unltimate object of the excercise is much more complicated than this, but if I can just get this parsing-related-records thing sorted I should be OK. If you have read this far, you have my thanks and admiration.

That's an interesting idea and I may have to do it with separate exports in the end, but I think you'll find that what you say about exports is wrong- if you export related records, you get the lot: if you have one record in table A with 10 related records in table B, when you export to, say, Excel, you'll get ten rows, the first of which will have the data from table A and B and the others will have it only from table B. You also get all the related records if you export XML using FMPXMLRESULT, but that format is no use to my target application, so I need to parse it into nested tags if at all possible. But I'll try the separate-export thing, thanks.

Anyone know how this works when exporting related fields? I have no problem exporting using a stylesheet when I'm exporting just from the one table, but if I include related fields, and hence have more than 1 related records per main record, I only get one related record in the resulting XML, not the whole lot. Here's my XSLT stylesheet, which is very happy with "local" fields only, but I need to get it to drill down and process all the related fields instead of just the first one: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" exclude-result-prefixes="fmp"> Baffled!