How Do I create a PDF Document Database

On our site what we did is modify the book feature node to feature PDF documents only with a page that listed the content in plain text. The structure goes [Book-Division], [Chapter-Branch], [Section-Document Class], [Sub-Section-Document]. When the page loads it provides the text of the document in plain text and a link to the PDF document on the website server. It's pretty basic but we've found it works well. You can also restrict access to the content to administrators or certain user classes using this method. Hope that helps!

I want to do exactly the same thing, though with XML docs instead of PDF. I'd like my docs to exist as a regular Drupal node or flexinode type but, when clicked on, return only the raw document bytes and correct Content-Type instead of a normal themed page.

My solution for now is that I created a flexinode type (e.g. "XML doc") with a single text field. To create a new document node, I upload the document to server and create a XML doc node in which I manually store the document's file name in the text field.

I then created node-flexinode-n.tpl.php to theme nodes of type XML doc and use PHP to embed a document plugin (in my case Flash, in yours Acrobat Reader) with a reference to the actual document URL.

Finally, I use the module node_privacy_byrole to limit access to the XML doc object to subscribers only.

This isn't as good a solution as described in my first paragraph. A subscriber who reads the HTML can deduce the URL of the underlying file and download it directly, tell others how to get it, etc (or if some docs are public, anyone can figure out the trick). Of course, the subscriber could also just share his/her password.

Hope this helps,

Barry