Outputting xml to website

[tonydanza]

I'm new to filemaker so bear with me, I've done countless searches but have really not found an answer. My company has a large catalog database in filemaker, they want to show certain elements of the database online. ie. pricing, description and image. They do not want this live. They just want to output the information into an xml or php/mysql database and populate the webpage from that. The prices always change so we need to be outputting monthly and then updating the website. The graphic designer has a nice page layout, The layout calls for an image in one table or div tag, the pricing in another table or div tag and then the description in another table or div, these tables are seperate and not together and there is imagery, text etc. between them. So I need to call certain field information into different sections of the site. (if that makes sense) I know php but everything i've read requires you to host filemaker server advanced, which we have, but we do not want to host or put our entire database online. I;ve outputted via XML but how do I just get certain fileds and records from an inventory of thousands? I hope this makes sense and someone can point me in the right direction. thanks,

[Martin Brändle]

You would restrict the export to certain records by searching them first in the database.

Then you export chunks of XML by specifying the required fields only. During XML export, you can specify an XSLT file which transforms the XML to a final HTML piece.

These HTML chunks (in different files) could then be included with server side includes (SSI).

For all this, you would only need FM7, not FMS7A.

[tonydanza]

Martin, Thank you for the very fast responce, The imagery are in container fields which doesn't seem to allow me to export via xml? Also I do not know anything about XSLT, could the same be achieved with CSS and XML. Or Is filemaker XML not recognizable without first stylizing it via XSLT. thank you for your time

[Martin Brändle]

You have to export the images separately, because XML is basically text.

XSLT is itself written in XML and defines rules to transform XML into something else, e.g. HTML.

XML data ----+

             +---> XSLT transformation ---> XML, HTML, text, something else 

XSLT rules --+

The XML produced by FileMaker cannot be used directly in a web page. Therefore you have to transform it.

For learning XSLT, see e.g. the book by Beverly Voth, FileMaker Pro 6 : Developer's Guide to XML/XSL, Wordware Publishing, 2003.