By mlcc2000 on

I'm a newbie with Drupal, so please be gentle!

I have several XML files that get updated daily, weekly and monthly. I would like the content of these XML files posted in a table and displayed in a Drupal page. How would I do this? And, is there an automated method of updating the Drupal page when the XML file is updated - thru a cron job, etc.?

Thank you....

SysInfo:

Windows 2000 OS
IIS 5.x
Drupal 4.7.4
MySQL 4.x
PHP 4.4.4

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

alanburke’s picture

alanburke commented

By co-incidence, I've just started to investgate this for a new project.

I reckon that the
import/export API module will certainly help to some degree
http://drupal.org/node/67043/

I need to achive something similar.

I need to be able to update the database, by uploading a spreadsheet.
I'm not sure how this could function.

I haven't seen a module that does exactly what i want, but I'll keep looking!

Regards
Alan

Drupal development and themeing, Galway, Ireland

mlcc2000’s picture

mlcc2000 commented

I've downloaded the import/export module and started playing with it.

As I found out the hard way, be careful importing the examples. I imported the variable data example and changed many settings. Good thing I don't have many users - yet.

I'll let you know if I have any concrete success.

Thank you.

kiwibird’s picture

kiwibird commented

Was there any success with the import/export module?

This seems exactly like my problem too. There is an offsite XML (not RSS) file that I need to parse and cache every 10 minutes or so, storing it somehow in Drupal's database, and I'm guessing I'll write a viewer module for it too (not sure if the Views module will be enough).

(I'm guessing just making a cron job for some page that I define myself, I'm not sure if it's good practice to to call Drupal's own cron.php that often though? Do the modules that implement hook_cron() check to see if they've been called too recently?)

I need to figure out the best way of storing the content. If the import/export module does this all for me, that'd be great...

mlcc2000’s picture

mlcc2000 commented

No - import/export did not work for me. The limiting factor for me was the XML file. The only xml parser that would read it properly was a parser I wrote in perl. The parsers/modules in php/drupal would not read all the data. Yes, the XML file is probably non-standard. Oh well, I didn't create it - just gotta read it!

I put together something that seems to work for me. The xml content I deal with only updates once a day.

Setup a scheduled task (control panel on windows or cron on unix) that:
1. Copies my xml files from the various locations to my webserver.
2. Runs a parser to pull out the content I need and into a delimited file.
3. Create the tables and insert the content in the db .

To display the data:
Created "story" content which runs a small php script that presents the data in a table. Did not use the TableManager module - just html code.

Seems like a lot to go thru but it does work.

Does this help???

kiwibird’s picture

kiwibird commented

It is similar to what I'm planning on doing, although I've now written my parser as a Drupal module (using php's own xml parser), just putting the relevant info into a simple array before trying to make a my own CCK-node out of it. I'm not sure how to call it yet though, seeing as I only want this script to have access to creating that kind of node, but want the script called by cron (so cron needs to use a "logged in" web browser, I guess).

I'm still not sure how to programmatically create nodes though; I guess I could use your method to just bypass that, but I'd like to do things within the Drupal framework, since I want to use the Events module for nice calendar views.