Hi Ricky,
<snip>
Larry, what you are doing sounds interesting. Do you have anything that can
be looked at? Our current ERP system has a lot of hooks for allow web
services with XML data output but we haven't put any of that to use yet.
</snip>
You can get the current version of XMLi from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmli/files/
I will be uploading the latest version I have been working on (V1.0.1) in a few days. It will have:
- A couple of bug fixes
- The MMAIL extension so you can send emails using XMLi if you have MMAIL installed
- The CGI extension so you can run your XMLi templates from within the HTTP server
- A document detailing how to configure your HTTP server to enable the templates (VERY simple)
- A document detailing how XMLi works (XMLi1 and XMLi2) and outlining the available tags/attributes used in the XMLi template language
- Over 20 example templates showing what you can do with your templates:
- - Dynamically build and run CL commands (with error support)
- - Run SQL and use the results in your templates
- - Define and use variables
- - Conditional statements (if, do-while, do-until, choose, for, for-each)
- - Output mechanisms - write to file, write to stdout, call handler passing pointer and length
- - Use of XMLi provided extensions (string, date, time, math, job, xml, cgi, mmail)
- - Example templates to be served from the HTTP server. These show how you can use JavaScript, JQuery and JQueryMobile stylesheets in your templates
- The RUNXMLI command to allow you to run a template from the command line (takes up to 64 parms that can be referenced within the running template)
We currently use XMLi to:
- Generate XML documents for communication between systems
- Generate XML Spreadsheets to open in Excel. The data is usually built from one or more SQL queries run within the template. (it is now possible to use the MMAIL extension to send the document to the users)
- Generate dynamic HTML pages to be served from the HTTP server
- Generate XML to be used with XSL stylesheets to build either PDF or postscript files for emailing/printing
I have also used XML generated from a XMLi template and served from the HTTP server as a XML datasource for SmartGWT widgets and BIRT reports. Just use the URL and it will get your XML.
XMLi templates can be used to generate JSON data if required - just build your template to do it. It supports extensions so if it doesn't do something you need you can just build an extension (in RPG) and plug it in. That's all I did to enable MMAIL!
Have a play with the V1.0.0 examples to get an idea of how the templates look and how they work. But if you want the latest version (V1.0.1) just yell and I'll send it over via private mail. Otherwise, it will be on sourceforge by next week.
Cheers, and have fun!
Larry Ducie
midrange.com
