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XML file of DVD catalog – now what??
I’ve been using software called Movie Collector to catalog a DVD collection for a store, and it has an option to display the catalog on their website for a monthly charge, but I hate the way it’s displayed. It’s only searchable by genre, not actors or directors (even though this is part of the catalog), and it won’t display any of the plot descriptions for the films, which is really important for my purposes. The software will, however, export the catalog to an XML file. So my question is: is there any software out there that will make it easy for me to take that XML file and display it, and have it searchable/browsable by different categories like actor, director, title, genre, AND display the full contents of each film entry? I’ve found tutorials on displaying simple XML pages as a formatted list, but I’m looking for something a little more complex and searchable. Here’s the website that Movie Collector synchronizes with, using their demo collection as an example:
https://connect.collectorz.com/users/demo/movies
You can see how the list is only browsable by genre, format, region, collection status, and “seen it.” Also, if you type a director or actor’s name in the search box, it displays no results even if you use one of the names you see on the front page. And when you click on one of the movies in the list, it doesn’t show you a description of the movie, even though this info is catalogued in the xml file.
Anyone know where I can find something that will do a better job of searching an XML file?
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2 Replies
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hello…
i think you’d have to go down the road of writing a custom tool in php or the likes to import that xml file, parse it and then do what you want. it isn’t that hard of a project to write set up if you know databases and programming, but i don’t know of any off-the-shelf solutions that could take in what is a custom xml file and do what you want… :-/
if i were to tackle this personally, i’d probably go for a system that took the exported xml file and imported that info into a relational db like mysql or the likes, and then put a php wrapper around that db that let users search and find to their heart’s content on any field in the file. then, whenever you exported a new xml, you could re-run the import into the db and the php would be ready to find the new titles…
sitruc
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OK, that makes enough sense! Thank you!
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