Ajax + XML + MySQL

[bcochofel]

Hi, I'm using Perl CGI and HTML::Template to generate the following
XML:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xml" href="RR.xsl"?>
<!-- $Id: template.xml,v 1.5 2006/12/11 11:13:30 bcochofel Exp $ -->
<RR
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://cochofel.sytes.net
~bcochofel/iweb/files/RR.xsd">
<Request>
<url>/~bcochofel/iweb/cgi-bin/getmysites.cgi</url>
<session>
<user>[email protected]</user>
</session>
<query>
<!-- o campo parametro pode ter varias ocurrencias -->
<param name="sort" value="asc" />
<param name="field" value="" />
</query>
</Request>
<Response>
<sites>
<site url="http://www.google.com">
<tag name="pesquisa" weight="30" />
<tag name="procura" weight="30" />
</site>
<site url="http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1">
<tag name="ajax" weight="25" />
<tag name="pesquisa" weight="30" />
<tag name="procura" weight="30" />
</site>
<site url="https://webmail.fe.up.pt">
<tag name="email" weight="20" />
<tag name="feup" weight="20" />
</site>
</sites>
</Response>
</RR>
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Response element gets information from a MySQL DB and this is only
an example.

I'm creating a XSL file to transform this XML output in XHTML with the
results in a table, something like:

----------------------
| URL | TAG | WEIGHT |
----------------------

One URL can have several TAGS. URL is an attribute of the element
site.

What I want his to let the client click on the table tittle (url, tag
or weight) to sort the elements using that field, if the elements are
already sorted with that field then the order is toogle (ascending
and descending).

I want to do this in the client side using Ajax but I can't figure out
how to do this. How can I get the XML elements without querying the
MySQL server again? Can I do this? Does javascript has some object to
retrieve XML elements like this?

I'm using CGI::Ajax, a Perl module, but if I use this I'll have to
querie MySQL server again to resort the elements (at least I think I
have to...)

Can someone point me out some kind of solution to this? I'm a newbie
in using Ajax and XML.

Thanks,
Bruno

 

[gregmcmullinjr]

I'm not a real expert on XML, but I do know that you can create an XML
document in memory in most browsers.

Microsoft uses its "Microsoft.XMLDOM" object, and I believe in Mozilla
you can simply create a new "document" (Although that I'm less sure
about). Once you have these objects you can load them up with whatever
XML you want -- presumably in your case the XML returned from your AJAX
request. You then have the XML stored on the client's machine and can
write some javascript stuff to output it as you would like.

Cheers,

Greg