I've been playing about with XML lately. Says a bit about my life I guess, but anyway. In typical "me" fashion I seem to be doing things the hard way, by starting off wanting to make it do things that *I* think it should be able to do, but really it can't do. Main reason for writing this is in case anyone sees anything they know how to fix, or how to get around - PLEASE mail me or comment me if you see a way around any of these problems!
The main problem seems to be lack of info about server side support for some of this. PHP and ASP servers have server side libraries, allowing the XML to be integrated seamlessly on the server and presented to the client as raw HTML, but Domino doesn't seem to allow this. It took me quite a while to realise this, as for some time i was trying to do a lot of my stuff purely through the client.
Example number 1:
http://www.merauderweb.com/DAOC
You wont see much on this page I suspect - you might see a little error box down the bottom left of your Internet Explorer, as the page is trying to violate the default security policy by accessing an external data source. Personally, I dont see why they've set access to external data sources as "Disabled" in all zones - Intranet zone I can understand, but in theory when you're accessing anything on the Internet then its "external" to you, so why should it matter which site some of it is being pulled from? Anyway, if you set your client to either "Prompt" or "Enable" for external data sources you'll see some data parsed in a table showing server information of the DAOC (Dark Age of Camelot) US servers, or European servers if they've enabled the feed and I've edited the page.
I want to do this server side.. or somehow..
Example number 2:
http://www.merauderweb.com/XFiles.html
This is the XML version of the Random Files section. Dunno why I named the page ".html", but there was a reason at the time. My main problem here is with the sorting. Text sorting works without a worry, but as soon as I try to sort based on date or number, it fails miserably.
The XSL template by default sorts on the first column of my view, which is the filename, ie:
The column headers (static) are defined as such, so they reference a javascript function "Sort" on click:
The sort function itself is quite simple, looking like this:
function sort(column) {
sortColumn = style.selectSingleNode("//@order-by");
sortColumn.value = "entrydata[@columnnumber='" + column +"']"
doTransform();
}
Nowhere in here can I see any option to specify the data type. In the XSL I've been playing with this line;
<
which was originally set to /text instead of /number, or /datetime for the date/time field. According to what I could decipher from reading the DTD file, this syntax is correct, although reading a raw DTD file hunting for a certain string when you've been playing about with XML for all of 2-3 hours is a bit frustrating.
My final problem was when I read a little about RSS - it sounded very cool indeed, however there seems to be a distinct lack of info about integrating it into your site. Most of it seems to focus around perl libraries, and the best I found for Notes was a small application that runs on the client, and converts the RSS to Notes documents manually using a small java agent (That I couldnt get to run because it required .jar files tha have been "superceded" by products that arent actually in full release yet, and hence don't have proper archives available, and if they did probably would be a lot of help to me anyway!).
I guess I should wander off and see if any of this has been integrated into RNext at all, but it seems more and more that people are interested in outputting XML to other servers than to actually presenting all in one Domino solutions. It could be something to do with IBM's "long term vision", or it could be my horrible habit of trying to make Domino do things it shouldn't.
Anyway, I'm taking a break from XML now. Pending answers to any of the above. Help me if you can!