About Xml And Coldfusion - MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX Develop Manual

About XML and ColdFusion

In the last few years, XML has rapidly become the universal language for representing documents
and data on the web. These documents can extend beyond the traditional concept of a paper
document or its equivalent. For example, XML is often used to represent database or directory
information. XML is also commonly used to represent transaction information, such as product
orders or receipts, and for information such as inventory records and employee data.
Because XML represents data in a tagged, textual format it is an excellent tool for representing
information that must be shared between otherwise-independent applications such as order entry
and inventory management. No application needs to know anything about the other. Each
application only needs to be prepared to get data in a format that is structured according to the
XML DTD or Schema. For example, in a distributed order processing application, the order
placement component, order fulfilment component, inventory management component, and
billing component can all share information with each other in XML format. They could use a
common XML DTD, of different components could communicate with each other using
different DTDs.
After an application parses the XML document, it can then manipulate the information in any
way that is appropriate. For example, you can convert tabular XML data into a ColdFusion
recordset, perform queries on the data and then export the data an XML document. For example,
the code in "Example: using XML in a ColdFusion application" on page 692
order in XML, converts the data to a recordset, and uses a query to determine the order cost. It
then prepares a receipt as an XML document.
ColdFusion provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use set of tools for creating and using XML
documents. ColdFusion lets you do the following with XML documents:
•
Convert XML text into ColdFusion XML document objects.
•
Create new ColdFusion XML document objects.
•
Modify ColdFusion XML document objects.
•
Transform XML using XSLT.
•
Extract data from XML documents using XPath expressions.
•
Convert ColdFusion XML document objects to text and save them in files.
670 Chapter 31: Using XML and WDDX
takes a customer