NAME¶
DBIx::XML_RDB - Perl extension for creating XML from existing DBI datasources
SYNOPSIS¶
use DBIx::XML_RDB;
my $xmlout = DBIx::XML_RDB->new($datasource,
"ODBC", $userid, $password, $dbname) || die "Failed to make new xmlout";
$xmlout->DoSql("select * from MyTable");
print $xmlout->GetData;
DESCRIPTION¶
This module is a simple creator of XML data from DBI datasources. It allows you
to easily extract data from a database, and manipulate later using
XML::Parser.
One use of this module might be (and will be soon from me) to extract data on
the web server, and send the raw data (in XML format) to a client's browser,
and then use either XML::Parser from PerlScript, or MSXML from
VBScript/JavaScript on the client's machine to generate HTML (obviously this
relies upon using MS IE for their Active Scripting Engine, and MSXML comes
with IE5beta).
Another use is a simple database extraction tool, which is included, called
sql2xml. This tool simply dumps a table in a database to an XML file. This can
be used in conjunction with xml2sql (part of the XML::DBI(?) package) to
transfer databases from one platform or database server to another.
Binary data is encoded using UTF-8. This is automatically decoded when parsing
with XML::Parser.
Included with the distribution is a "Scriptlet" - this is basically a
Win32 OLE wrapper around this class, allowing you to call this module from any
application that supports OLE. To install it, first install the scriptlets
download from microsoft at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting. Then
right-click on XMLDB.sct in explorer and select "Register". Create
your object as an instance of "XMLDB.Scriptlet".
FUNCTIONS¶
new¶
new ( $datasource, $dbidriver, $userid, $password [, $dbname] )
See the DBI documentation for what each of these means, except for $dbname which
is for support of Sybase and MSSQL server database names (using "use
$dbname").
DoSql¶
DoSql ( $sql )
Takes a simple Sql command string (either a select statement or on some DBMS's
can be a stored procedure call that returns a result set - Sybase and MSSql
support this, I don't know about others).
This doesn't do any checking if the sql is valid, if it fails, the procedure
will "die", so if you care about that, wrap it in an eval{} block.
The result set will be appended to the output. Subsequent calls to DoSql don't
overwrite the output, rather they append to it. This allows you to call DoSql
multiple times before getting the output (via
GetData()).
GetData¶
Simply returns the XML generated from this SQL call. Unfortunately it doesn't
stream out as yet. I may add this in sometime in the future (this will
probably mean an IO handle being passed to
new()).
The format of the XML output is something like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<DBI driver="dbi:Sybase:database=foo">
<RESULTSET statement="select * from Table">
<ROW>
<Col1Name>Data</Col1Name>
<Col2Name>Data</Col2Name>
...
</ROW>
<ROW>
...
</ROW>
</RESULTSET>
<RESULTSET statement="select * from OtherTable">
...
</RESULTSET>
</DBI>
This is quite easy to parse using XML::Parser.
AUTHOR¶
Matt Sergeant, matt@sergeant.org
SEE ALSO¶
XML::Parser