Maybe someone can help a newbie to FMP and XML

April 24, 200322 yr

Newbies

https://dlaweb.bsm.dla.mil/SRweb/ contains XML files under the 'download daily' area.

Also available is something called a 'DTD' file . I know the DTD is Doc Type Definition. From first reasearch I gather this is similar to an XSLT.

PROBLEM:When I try to open XML source and direct Filemaker to the downloaded XML file (SolsDailyXML2003-04-23.xml) it returns an 'XML Parsing Error...'Attribute NAME not declared for Element SYSTEMPARAMETER'.

Do I need to somehow use the DTD to create an XSL which will tell FMP how to interpret the XML? or is there something wrong with my thinking that FMP can open this doc?

Could I somehow open in Excel or is some other APP required to get this data into FMP?

Muchos Gracias for anything anyone can tell me

April 24, 200322 yr

A DTD only allows the XML interpreter to validate the document structure of the XML. (allowed elements, their order, etc...)

It has nothing to do with XSL files, apart from that you need this info to generate an XML->XML translator.

A quick look at the dtds revealed a fairly complex structure of the files. This requires a series of database tables to import/export this info.

QuickStart:

You could import the data into an xml-editor (there are several free ones written in java, try a search at http://freshmeat.net) and export the data as tab or csv text. Your results will vary depending on the data in the XML files ....

As you are a newbie to both FileMaker and XML i would not recommend getting into this too far, except when you have some expertise in html, perl, php and other databases ....

2 weeks later...

May 2, 200322 yr

Yes - you do need to have a XSL file for import and a XLST file for import to direct the xml data to a readable format for or from the intended application.

Look in the FileMaker Examples folder in XML example. Run the file and do some import and export. Look at the scripts, etc. Once you understand what is happening, open the files that are being used and look at the code. You can probably figure out how they work together.

But as cjaeger stated, unless you have some experience in some kind of net language - at minimum, HTML - you won't be able to figure it out.