[FX.php List] Anyone using XSLT anymore?

[Bob Patin]

Hi Dan,

I was trying to remember who it was who wrote me about that caching  
plugin--it was you! Thanks for writing this morning; I just got off  
the phone with my client.

>
> Did you ever get the caching solution down?

No, I never did, and was going to look for the email where you  
mentioned a caching "spider" that would cache during off-peak hours.  
Does it have the capacity to run queries on its own? Specifically, is  
it smart enough to go to an input page, select from a pulldown, and  
run a query?

> Also, did you try a redesign of the HTML deployment system with the  
> HTML files stored in the filesystem and the FMP database holding  
> the paths? I would think an include() php call would be faster than  
> trying to dump HTML files out of FMP.

Well, that's what we have now. Several years back I wrote a program  
for them in Visual Basic, which takes this mountain of Word documents  
that they have, converts them to HTML, and then breaks them into  
separate pages, complete with Javascript pulldowns for searching. As  
the company has grown, their site has gotten up to approx. a half- 
million of these small HTML pages.

Six months ago they approached me about moving this all into a  
database, which I've suggested to them all along. The problem is that  
the source data is in these Word documents and can't be stored in a  
typical database in little pieces; for several reasons, they have to  
work from these long documents, and the easiest method is to convert  
the Word docs to HTML and then deal with that.

The problem with referencing the documents in FileMaker is that they  
still have to deal with uploading these thousands of documents every  
year; this is autmotive data, and so they have updates quarterly I  
believe, and there are tons of these documents that their admin guy  
has to upload and keep straight. I wrote a solution in PHP and it  
works great, but there's one query that has to return about 18 of  
these HTML pages, and by the time it's parsed, it takes around 7-10  
seconds for the page to be displayed. I'm testing with a very fast G5  
running FMSA, and never could get the speed any better.

Here's a question: the test web server's running on a lowly G4 1.25;  
would a faster web server make a big difference, since it's running WPE?
>
> I looked at XSLT when I first went to the web with FMP and it  
> looked so kooky that I scrambled for other options. Luckily I found  
> FX.php just in time. Thanks, Chris.
>
> I believe that the XSLT engine deals with the raw XML out of FMP  
> WPE. In FX.php there is a translation stage where XML is changed  
> from XML to PHP arrays. That adds some overhead. But, XSLT has  
> another problem that FX does not: the relative numbers of people  
> who can design, maintain and fix an XSLT system is very small.

That's exactly what I cautioned them about this morning; I told him  
that they'd have a nightmare problem trying to keep the system  
updated over time, since no consultants that I know are using XSLT  
with FileMaker.

Could you tell me again about that caching system you mentioned?  
Could it work at night and cache queries? Thousands of them? That  
would be the solution if it would do that... he said hopefully,  
trying to keep his client... :)

Thanks!

Bob Patin
Longterm Solutions
bob at longtermsolutions.com
615-333-6858
http://www.longtermsolutions.com

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