XML

[rowyn]

For those of you familiar with using xml --

I want to be able to code an xml form which will do basic mathmatical operations and store data. For exmple, my end user would see a form that said "Enter X" and "Enter Y", and after the user entered X & Y, the page would calculate X/Y, display the result, and then store everything.

Now, my actual question is not "how do I do this?" but "how annoying is it to learn enough xml to know how to do this sort of thing?" It seems like a simple enough kind of thing, but I've not actually coded in xml before. I will have access to an exceedingly simple xml form designer which will do the "enter and store X&Y" part, but not do operations based on the data entered. I kinda want to just manually edit the designer's code and add the other stuff, but I'm not sure if this falls in the category of "browse webpages on xml coding and figure it out" or "get an xml book and figure it out" or "1-day training course" or "college class". Suggestions?

Comments

json

[garyamort.livejournal.com]

Well, I like the dependability of XML, but if their product gives you the option of getting the data in JSON format, go with that because it is dead easy to learn to access/code data stored in JSON.

As for XML itself, here is the summary for all you need to know to start:
Namespace:
xmlns:edi='http://ecommerce.example.org/schema'

At the top of the document. An arbitrary text string that just appears to look like a url. Your supposed to make a unique one for each type of file/data and in theory going to that url would give you a listing of all the fields - but practically no one ever actually sets up the documentation page - so it's just a meaningless string.

Basically, it's so a program would now that
xmlns:edi='http://ecommerce.example.org/schema1.0'
and
xmlns:edi='http://ecommerce.example.org/schema1.1'

Are 2 different formatting options for data, elements and attributes:
http://www.w3schools.com/DTD/dtd_el_vs_attr.asp

XML elements:
something like
tagname..tagdata....closetagname

Logical, self explanatory, the data is inside the tags.

Then you could have something like
setoftags
tag1name...tagdata...closetag1name
tag2name...tagdata...closetag2name
closesetoftags

Again, all of that is intuitive sense.

But most people like to store data in attributes instead, so it's
tagname....data=value....closetag
or even something like
setofdataname....name1=value1...name2=value2....closesetofdataname

Almost every language, including javascript has a parser to parse the xml into something meaningful, http://www.w3schools.com/xmL/xml_parser.asp that can then have programming assigned to it.

Re: json

[rowyn]

I am guessing that they won't support storing the data in JSON, a) because I've not heard them mention JSON and b) because their product is ultimately accessing and storing the data too. I could be lucky and it could support either format, though. I'll ask them. :)

Thanks for the advice and links! Very nifty. :)