I’ve got a bit of a situation, no code to speak of at this moment because I have really zero experience at using XML, so I’m hoping to just describe my situation and have someone point me in the right direction.
The basic set up is this:
- I have a website that is having XML files pushed to it via FTP, i.e. the files just show up on the server.
- The files all have the same basic structure (tree?) with differing content.
- There would, at any time, be hundreds of these files.
- I need to be able to output the content from these files onto the website.
- Some of these files are basically duplicates of each other, with minor edits. I would need to output onto the website ONLY the latest version of the file.
So far what I can think of is maybe combining all these files into one and then iterating over it to output the details on the site. I can’t tell if this would be a resource-heavy way of doing this, and I also can’t work out exactly how I would do it anyway.
I’ve been looking into XSLT, which seems theoretically able to do what I want, but I’m not sure whether it is the appropriate tool for the job or not? I also can’t work out exactly how that would be done anyway, as all teh things I’ve seen are really about applying formatting to your XML with XSL and XSLT (this is actually what makes me think it might be able to combine the files, but that this wouldn’t be the best way).
Also just generally, the idea of combining the files into one seems a bit clunky and inefficient, so I assume there may be some other method that I’m completely missing because I don’t know what to search for. Maybe it’s something to do with web services? I’m not entirely sure if this is actually a web service or not . . .
Any opinions on this would be appreciated! Please let me know if I need to provide any more information.