Including XML, RSS and RDF Files

To include an external well-formed XML document, the approach is very similar to the parsed method. The method attribute may be set to either XML, RSS, or RDF to explicitly set the method to XML parsing. Including a src attribute that ends in any of the .xml , .rss , or .rdf extensions will implicitly invoke this method as well.

The delimiter attribute in this context sets the name of the element (tag) within which to look for element fields to parse. For example, most of the relevant fields in an RDF file are contained directly within the <item> element; for this reason, item is the default delimiter element. For each delimiting element found, the entire <include> region will be looped through once.

Like the parsed method, the XML method uses the generalized <field> tag to display the contents of a field value. In this context, a field value refers to the character data within a named element (tag) inside the delimiting element. Field values will be displayed in the order in which they appear in the XML file unless a name attribute is set within the <field> tag, assigning the name of the element field to output. For example, a name="title" attribute refers to the character data within <title> and </title> in the source XML document.

As an example, suppose that you have an XML source document called languages.xml that describes languages related to PostgreSQL, with the following structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<languages>
  <language>
    <name>C</name>
    <notes>Built-in language.</notes>
  </language>
  <language>
    <name>LXP</name>
    <notes>Web-based content language.</notes>
  </language>
  <language>
    <name>PL/pgSQL</name>
    <notes>PostgreSQL procedural language.</notes>
  </language>
</languages>

In this scheme, notice that each language is described within the <language> element. To parse such an XML file in the same manner as the RDF example described earlier, set the delimiter attribute of the <include> tag to language and the src attribute to languages.xml. This is demonstrated in Example 13-24.

<lxp>
  <include src="languages.xml" delimiter="language" method="xml">
    Language Name: <field name="name" /><br />
    Language Notes: <field name="notes" /><br />
    <hr />
  </include>
</lxp>

When processed, the output of Example 13-24 would look like this:

    
    Language Name: C<br />
    Language Notes: Built-in language.<br />
    <hr />
    
    Language Name: LXP<br />
    Language Notes: Web-based content language.<br />
    <hr />
    
    Language Name: PL/pgSQL<br />
    Language Notes: PostgreSQL procedural language.<br />
    <hr />

Example 13-25 demonstrates the display of a simple RDF XML document. This example differs from Example 13-24 in that it addresses, specifically, an RDF document. As a result, the delimiter attribute can be omitted, since the default value of item is appropriate for the RDF schema.

<lxp>
  <include src="/home/web/ports/headlines/slashdot.rdf" lastblock="5">
  <table border="0" cellspacing="1"><tr>
    <td bgcolor="#ffffff" width="100%">
      <div class="content">- <field name="title"></div>
    </td>
  </tr><tr>
    <td bgcolor="#e0e0e8" width="100%">
      <strong>
        <field name="link" type="url" link="Read More..." target="_blank">
      </strong><br />
    </td>
  </tr></table>
  </include>
</lxp>

Notice also the use of the lastblock attribute in Example 13-25, which was also described in the Section called Including Token-Delimited Files " earlier in this chapter. Both the firstblock and lastblock attributes can also be used with XML, RDF, and RSS files to limit and offset which blocks of data are displayed.