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Revision as of 01:17, 28 November 2010

Вспомогательные классы
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KXMLHelper

XML is a convenient tree-structure format of organizing data. Each element can contain a value and/or other elements. Text inside an element can alternate with child elements, but it will still be considered a single value. Moreover, each element can have attributes. All of this is shown in the below example (let it be a file called "sample.xml"):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<our_document>
	<some_tag>
		Some tag's content.
	</some_tag>
	<planet_earth>
	    <continent id="1">
		North America
            	<country id="1">
			Canada
		</country>
          	<country id="2">
			USA
		</country>
	    </continent>
	    <continent id="2">
	    	Europe
            	<country id="1">
			Estonia
		</country>
            	<country id="2">
			Latvia
		</country>
            	<country id="3">
			Lithuania
		</country>
	    </continent>
	</planet_earth>
</our_document>

The CDATA Block

If the content of an element needs to contain symbols that could disrupt the correct parsing of an XML document, then the contents need to be inside a CDATA block. Some of these symbols include ">", "<" и "&". The syntax of a CDATA block looks like this:

<![CDATA[Some symbolic data, that > breaks & xml]]>

Data inside a CDATA block should not contain "]]>" because it will considered the end of the block. If it's absolutely necessary to have "]]>" then the following approach will work:

<![CDATA[]]]]><![CDATA[>]]>

In the above example, the contents are separated into two parts, each of which is inside a CDATA block. It's especially convenient to use CDATA in the situation where XML needs to be written to show to a user, but won't be processed when parsing the XML document.

Getting an XML Document

Before parsing an XML document, it has to be received.

Getting a Local File

To get a local file (i.e. located on the same computer as the site), the standard file_get_contents function can be used. This function returns the contents of file, the path of which is passed as its first argument.

$file_contents = file_get_contents(WRITEABLE . '/user_files/sample.xml');

Getting a Remote File

The file_get_contents function also allows retrieving the contents of a remote file. However, for security reasons, the server may restrict this functionality. Therefore, it's strongly recommended to use the standard K4 kCurlHelper class to retrieve remote files.

$curl_helper =& $this->Application->recallObject('CurlHelper');
/* @var $curl_helper kCurlHelper */
 
$xml_data = $curl_helper->Send('http://sample-host.com/sample.xml');

The Send method has a second optional parameter, which indicates that the connection should be terminated right after getting the contents of the document. By default, it's set to "true", i.e. terminate connection.

Parsing an XML Document

Realized in the kXMLHelper class is a convenient mechanism for parsing an XML document. The first step is to create an object of the class.

$xml_helper =& $this->Application->recallObject('kXMLHelper');
/* @var $xml_helper kXMLHelper */

Then, to start the parsing of the XML document retrieved earlier.

$root_node =& $xml_helper->Parse($file_contents);

A tree structure of objects will be returned as a result, in which all objects are connected using links. The contents of each object of the kXMLNode class looks like this:

kxmlnode Object (
	[Name] => xml_element_name
	[Attributes] => Array
	(
		[1st_attribute_name] => 1st_attribute_value
		[2nd_attribute_name] => 2nd_attribute_value
		...
	)
	[Children] => Array
	(
		[0] =>	kxmlnode Object
		[1] =>	kxmlnode Object
		...
	)
	[Data] => text_value_that_this_XML_element_encapsulates
	[firstChild] => kxmlnode Object
	[lastChild] => kxmlnode Object
	[Parent] =>  kxmlnode Object
	[Position] => 1
)

The below description of the contents of an object of the kXMLNode class will be based on the example at the beginning of the article.

The parent (root) object will be assigned to the $root_node variable, i.e. the xml-element object "our_document". The "Children" (private) attribute contains an array of all child elements of the current element. In this example, these are the two elements "some_tag" and "planet_earth". The last one has two "continent" child elements. It's import to understand that array elements are the same as other objects, they can themselves have child elements, etc.

Each element has a Position attribute. This is its order in the elements (same level elements, for example - "country" Canada and "country" USA). The "firstChild" and "lastChild" elements contain the first and last (from the point of view of their Position) child elements, respectively.

For further processing of received information the kXMLNode class methods and attributes are used.

kXMLHelper in Practice

The below code prints all of the countries in the above XML-document.

$root_node =& $xml_helper->Parse($xml_data);
/* @var $root_node kXMLNode */
 
// Getting first continent node
$continent_node =& $root_node->FindChild('continent');
 
// Cycling through it and all the rest of the continent nodes
do {
	// Getting first country node
	$country_node =& $continent_node->firstChild;
 
	// Cycling through it and all the rest of the continent nodes
    	do {
        	echo $continent_node->Attributes['ID'] . ' - ' . trim($continent_node->Data) . ': ' . $country_node->Attributes['ID'] . ' - ' . trim($country_node->Data) . '<br/>';
    	} while ($country_node =& $country_node->NextSibling());
} while ($continent_node =& $continent_node->NextSibling());

The $continent_node variable stores the first found "continent" object, i.e. - "North America". The first loop goes through the continents. The NextSibling method is used to go to the element of the same level (the counterpart of this method is PrevSibling). The first country is chosen from the continent. The inner loop goes through all countries of a continent and returns them in the below format. Note, the text values of the elements are accessible through the "Data" attribute.

1 - North America: 1 - Canada
1 - North America: 2 - USA
2 - Europe: 1 - Estonia
2 - Europe: 2 - Latvia
2 - Europe: 3 - Lithuania

"kXMLNode" Class Methods

Below are public methods of the kXMLNode class. All these methods are for reading data, but not for recording it.