PHP - MySQL - XML tutorial - basics

Draft

This article or section is currently under construction

In principle, someone is working on it and there should be a better version in a not so distant future.
If you want to modify this page, please discuss it with the person working on it (see the "history")

Introduction

Objectives

XML is often used to transport data between applications. In this tutorial (once it's fully done) we shall see how to:

• Store simple XML data (e.g. tabular data) in MySQL
• Query a database with SQL, get the result in XML and render in HTML

Prerequisites

• A little bit of PHP
• Some SQL (see the SQL and MySQL tutorial)
• XML (basic concepts)
• XSLT (for some parts, see XSLT Tutorial - Basics

Remark

We don't plan to write a tutorial on how to store complex XML data in an SQL database, because it's a too difficult subject for educational technology or computer application students. We rather suggest to an XML database for that.

Rendering a database query with XSLT

This example shows PHP

Retrieving data as XML

Since SQL query results

Further explorations

Other tutorials

• Output mySQL data as XML with PHP by Jubba, Kirupa.com. (easy)
• Using XML in MySQL 5.1 and 6.0 (shows for example how to create XML result sets with a simple MySQL or SELECT commands).

Sticking XML into a MysQL table

... to be written ...

Using libraries

Since sticking XML (in particular certain applications like RSS into MySQL and retrieving a result set as XML is a frequently encoutered problem, you also may consider various PHP libraries that do the job.

Example (none tested):

• XML 2 PHP and PHP 2 XML
• DbToXML