Contents tagged with XML
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JavaScript XML Cheat Sheet
Recently I was working on some complicated JavaScript to nest unordered lists and list items to match an Atom feed's XML structure. I had to spend an entire day researching JavaScript's XML parsing capabilities because there is no place on the Internet where this information is gathered to my satisfaction. I created a JavaScript cheat sheet on XML for my notes. I thought I would share it with you in order to get some feedback for improving my notes. Let me know if you know of a JavaScript library that eases the pain of working with XML in JavaScript. jQuery is somewhat useful for this if you use its DOM selectors on an XML document instead of the web page document. var entryNode = $('entry',xmlDoc).eq(5);
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Threaded Comment System
I'm currently working on threaded comment systems. Comment threads allow you to reply to a comment. This is a feature that the users are clamoring for on Vloggerheads because it is a popular feature on YouTube . Even the trolls are wondering when we are going to have this feature. One of the more amusing aspects of this project is the ongoing video commentary from the peanut gallery. It is like having Bill O'Reilly doing vicious news reports about the progress, or lack of progress, of your project.
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Developing Web Widgets
Last night I finally finished the improvements to my xml2json generic handler which were required to develop a Stickam widget. Since I am sending the URL of the feed as a query string value to the generic handler it was necessary to deal with ampersands in the feed's URL without screwing up the query string. So I added a line to replace the | character with the & character. If I have a feed with an ampersand in the URL I'll just send it with the | character instead. Trace listeners don't seem to work in generic handlers so I added code to write the feed URL and the JSON string to a log file for debugging purposes. The Stickam players in the XML were causing invalid JSON syntax because they were not getting null values. I am not interested in that information so I used RegexBuddy to come up with the regular expression to replace them with empty strings. I came across the infamous "invalid label name" error so I added parentheses around my JSON string. The last thing I did was add XML comments for the method that actually converts the XML to JSON because this code should be replace when a more reliable algorithm becomes available:
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JSON Syntax Checker Tool
Yesterday I found a useful tool for checking the syntax of JavaScript Object Notation strings: http://www.raboof.com/Projects/JsonChecker/ I needed that because I'm trying to create a widget for Stickam that will work in my compiled help file. I'm using my xml2json generic handler to convert XML to JSON and apparently it generated some invalid JSON. This tool helped me to narrow down the location of the syntax error.
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JSON And Cross Domain XML Requests
After finding a way to read RSS feeds in a custom help collection web page without cross domain restrictions, see previous blog post, I naturally wanted to do the same thing with XML feeds. You could probably figure that out for yourself given the RSS example but I hate it when I find sample code that does not quite do what I need. There were also some annoyances with my previous solution and I have some improvements.
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XSLT For A DataSet Designer XSS File
XML is being used for a lot of configuration files and to store application and system settings. It is also used extensively to define the presentation layer; Windows Presentation Foundation and Mozilla's XML User Interface Language for example. Therefore it is often useful to be able to transform XML into a more readable format for documentation.