Hey Wayne,
How you use XML to talk to another server is all up to what the other
server is looking for.
XML may look scary but luckily it's really not so complicated!
XML is just a set of nested tags with properties, where you can name
the tags and properties anything you want, and include text between
the tags.
Like here's some XML that stores information about 2 families
<families>
<family name="McDermots">
<Daughter>Shelly</Daughter>
<Son>Robert</Son>
</family>
<family name="Smiths">
<Aunt>Sally</Aunt>
<Uncle>Tim</Uncle>
</family>
</families>
it kind of looks like html with tags named other things right?
Well, HTML came from the ideas of XML and in fact, if you close all
your HTML tags on a page correctly, and follow some basic rules, your
HTML can become XHTML which just means "XML Compliant HTML". This is
useful for when you want to do something like store a web page as xml,
or use XML tools/techniques to traverse the XML tree of an HTML file
(such as taking a web page and finding all the href links with a
script).
XML tags can be named anything you want them to be and you can have as
many properties (such as the name="Smiths") as you want.
You can get complicated and have special rules about what makes a
certain type of xml valid or invalid but at the simplest level, XML is
valid if it's just in the same format as the program/server/whatever
is expecting.
If you are interacting with a payment gateway, they may require a
format something like this:
<payments>
<payment id="46372849">
<name>Bob Smith</name>
<amount>35.42</amount>
<ccnum>XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX</ccnum>
</payment>
<payment id="75849382">
<name>Sally McDermot</name>
<amount>242.88</amount>
<ccnum>XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX</ccnum>
</payment>
</payments>
Where you have a <payments> root tag, and then a <payment> tag for
each payment you want to process (with the required child nodes to
hold the information).
This is a bit simplified, but really not too much!
XML may sound scary, but likea lot of things, it sounds a lot more
complicated than it is.
There's probably some kind of format specification for the gateway you
want to talk to of what kind of xml to send, maybe their tech support
can help point you at the details.
Hope this helps!
Alan
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Wayne Irvine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have a confession to make. I don't understand XML.
>
> To me it looks like a format for marking up data with tags.
>
> But it's obviously much more than that. It seems to be the
> format/language/portal through which our servers talk to each other.
>
> I am involved in a development process at present that requires my server to
> talk XML with a payment gateway.
>
> What I don't understand is what action or metatags I use to initiate an XML
> coversation with another server.
>
> Any pointers or examples would be gratefully accepted.
>
> Wayne Irvine
>
> Byte Services Pty Ltd
> http://www.byteserve.com.au/
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Ph 02 9960 6099 Mob 0409 960 609 Fax 02 9960 6088
>
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