1. ColdFusion’s XML Capabilities Maryland CFUG April 12, 2005 Presented by Doug Ward

2. Agenda What is XML? Creating XML Parsing XML Searching XML Transforming XML XML examples

3. Sources Programming ColdFusion MX, 2 nd Edition, by Rob Brooks-Bilson Utilizing XML and XSLT in ColdFusion MX, Nate Weiss On Using XML Well: Creating a dynamic XML menu, by Ben Forta

4. A Definition of XML “XML is a tag-based markup language for describing data” What is XML?

5. How XML is similar to HTML XML and HTML are both subsets of SGML (Standards Generalized Markup Language) XML and HTML are both plain-text formats utilizing tags (called elements in XML) and attributes What is XML?

6. How XML is different from HTML XML demands strict adherence to correct syntax XML doesn’t have anything to do with how the data it describes is displayed XML is extensible What is XML?

7. Creating an XML Document The XML declaration XML comments The root element Nested child elements Element attributes Creating XML

8. Generating XML in ColdFusion Generating XML using the tag Using the XmlFormat() tag to sanitize strings Creating XML

9. The XML Document Object The XML document object is a ColdFusion MX datatype The XML document object shares many similarities with ColdFusion structures and arrays The XmlParse() function Parsing XML

10. Referencing an XML Document Object Basic view DOM (Document Object Model) node view Parsing XML

11. Basic View Top-level document object and the root structure Element structures Using structure and array functions to access elements of the XML document object Parsing XML

12. DOM Node View In the DOM node view, XML documents are represented as a hierarchical tree of nodes Each node in the tree consists of a node name, a node type, and a node value Parsing XML

13. Matching XML Data with XPath XPath is a W3C recommendation outlining a language for addressing parts of an XML document ColdFusion supports XPath as a query tool for extracting data from XML document objects via the XmlSearch() function Searching XML

14. Transforming XML with XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) works with XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) to perform the actual transformations ColdFusion MX uses the XMLTransform() function to perform an XSLT transformation on an XML string or document object Transforming XML

15. XML Examples Dynamic XML menus WDDX data files

16. XML Resources www.xml.com www.oasis-open.org XML and XSLT in ColdFusion MX On using XML well