Need to send an XML request to a URL - where to start!

Question

Hi guys,

I need to send an XML request to a URL.

Fairlu unsure where to start with this as it's not something I've attempted before.

I'm doing this using PHP, and at the moment I'm calling the data from a mysql database where the last payment date is 90 days or over, showing it in a html table. Underneath this table I'd ideally like to have a button that says "Request payment" or similar.

The table headers in the database are not what the tags in the XML would be. As there might be a number of payments that need to go through, I wondered if a while loop would be used.

These are the tags that should be used for the XML request:

<request type="receipt-in" timestamp="20030520151742">
<merchantid></merchantid>
<account></account>
<orderid></orderid>
<amount currency="EUR"></amount>
<payerref></payerref>
<paymentmethod></paymentmethod>
<autosettle flag="1" />
<md5hash />
<sha1hash></sha1hash>
</request>

I need to be able to populate this request with the data from the HTML table as mentioned above.

If anyone could offer me some guidance, that would be great.

(I'm not looking for anyone to do this for me, just give me advice on where to start)

thanks :)

Answer 1

Your question is horribly vague, but SOAP and XML-RPC are usually used to communicate using XML over HTTP.