Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderman - PHP

Now that the hard sell is over and you're (hopefully) all set up with patConfiguration, let's take a simple example to see how it works.

Consider the following simple configuration file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<path name="mail">
<configValue 
name="from-name" type="string">Peter
Parker</configValue>
<configValue 
name="from-address"
type="string">spider.man@roof.top.com</configValue>
</path>
</configuration>

The XML file above contains configuration data in a format that is understood by patConfiguration. As you can see, a patConfiguration-compliant configuration file must conform to the standard rules of XML markup, and must contain a <configuration> root element. Configuration values can be grouped together under this root element using <path> elements, with every variable-value pair represented by a <configValue> element.

Variable-value pairs are accessed by drilling down the tree of <path> elements until the desired node is reached. For example, to access the value of the email address

spider.man@roof.top.com 

in the configuration file above, I would use the path

mail.from-address.

patConfiguration allows you to nest <path> elements to any depth - the following is a perfectly valid configuration file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<path name="application">
<configValue 
name="name"
type="string">SomeApp</configValue>
<configValue name="version"
type="string">2.3</configValue>
<path 
name="window">
<configValue name="height"
type="int">600</configValue>
<configValue 
name="width"
type="int">500</configValue>
<path name="list">
<configValue 
name="maxItems"
type="int">5</configValue>
</path>
</path>
</path>
</configuration>

You can even link the values in a configuration file with each other via the <getConfigValue> element - consider the following example, which uses the application name and version number to dynamically create a variable containing the window title:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<path name="application">
<configValue 
name="name"
type="string">SomeApp</configValue>
<configValue name="version"
type="string">2.3</configValue>
<path 
name="window">
<configValue name="height"
type="int">600</configValue>
<configValue 
name="width"
type="int">500</configValue>
<configValue name="title" type="string">
<getConfigValue 
path="application.name"
/> <getConfigValue path="application.version" />
</configValue>
</path>
</path>
</configuration>

The variable-value pairs in this configuration file can be read and manipulated by patConfiguration in the context of a PHP application. Let's look at that next.

>>> More PHP Articles          >>> More By Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire

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