is it possible to script a .XML file

Question

Hi,

is it possible to script a .XML file?

what we are after is there will be a .XML file on a webserver (IIS) for e.g. www.myserver.com/update.xml

which when called should execute it as a script rather than serve it as a file.

when the .XML file is called it will excute a series of calls example make a DB trip and then return the result in .XML format

is this possible?

Answer 1

XML is a data representation and not a scripting language.

It sounds to me like you actually want to map the URL /update.xml to an underlying script/program (in any executable language), have that run and then return the data as an XML type (mime type text/xml). Which is perfectly feasible.

Answer 2

why call it .xml at all? If you have a asp.net page with an extention of .aspx (so it will run) then you can have that return XML in its response and set its content type to be text/xml

Nothing to say an xml file has to have a .xml extention :)

Other web languages are available it could easily be a PHP file, Ruby, JSP etc.

Additionally you could also set up IIS (or Apache) to treat all .xml extention files as aspx files though I would advise against it for ease of maintenance.

Answer 3

There's absolutely no way an XML file can be executed: it's just markup, nothing more. However, you can come up with an interpreter which would execute this XML, but using XML as a programming language is generally a very bad idea:

<if condition="a = 5">        
    <invoke function="doStuff">
        <parameter value="34" />
    </invoke>
</if>

The behavior you're after can be achieved with any server-side scripting technology (PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, etc.): you just map the Update.xml to an appropriate handler and it will then do everything you need.