xml_rdb(3)

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 data
sources. 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 conjunc
tion 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 "Reg
ister". 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 state
ment 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 Ta

ble">

<ROW>
<Col1Name>Data</Col1Name>
<Col2Name>Data</Col2Name>
...
</ROW>
<ROW>
...
</ROW>

</RESULTSET>
<RESULTSET statement="select * from Oth

erTable">
...
</RESULTSET>

</DBI>

This is quite easy to parse using XML::Parser.

AUTHOR

Matt Sergeant, matt@sergeant.org

SEE ALSO

XML::Parser

perl v5.8.0 2000-12-13 XML_RDB(3)