XML Transaction

[deepak]

Hello we are a online area rug retailer. We are preparing a proposal for another online site that will send us traffic. They want us to "be able to report sales data on a monthly basis in XML transaction. Orders and returns must be sent XML".

What is XML? We are a small setup & don't have a technical in change. I know HTML & a bit os ASP programming. can some one help us understand what we may have to do to meet this request. Is it a costly & very technical affair?

Thanks a lot.
Deepak

 

[Kenneth Stephen]

Hello we are a online area rug retailer. We are preparing a proposal for another online site that will send us traffic. They want us to "be able to report sales data on a monthly basis in XML transaction. Orders and returns must be sent XML".

What is XML? We are a small setup & don't have a technical in change. I know HTML & a bit os ASP programming. can some one help us understand what we may have to do to meet this request. Is it a costly & very technical affair?

Deepak,

Let me answer your last question first : anything is costly if you / your team lack the experience. XML is not anymore complex than anything else. If you took a random person off the street, someone who didnt know what HTML is, and tasked him / her with building an HTML based application, you are in for a lot of trouble. Fortunately, there are a lot of people around who know about HTML and there are quite a few folks who know about XML.

XML is a format for data. It stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It is a modification of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). HTML itself is a derivative of SGML. So, reading XML is quite easy if you know how to read HTML. However, getting something into XML format may only be half the job. It depends on what your partner is expecting from you. If they are expecting the xml file to be ftp'd / emailed to them, then you are ok. If however, they are expecting a SOAP request from you with the XML file as the payload, then you will have more work to do.

Regards,
Kenneth

 

[Ian (archive)]

Hello we are a online area rug retailer. We are preparing a proposal for another online site that will send us traffic. They want us to "be able to report sales data on a monthly basis in XML transaction. Orders and returns must be sent XML".

What is XML? We are a small setup & don't have a technical in change. I know HTML & a bit os ASP programming. can some one help us understand what we may have to do to meet this request. Is it a costly & very technical affair?

Thanks a lot.
Deepak

Your best bet to start is to ask them for sample xml files for all transaction types. XML formats are quite like html tags, although stricter about having matching beginning and end tags. Once you understand them they should not cause you too much trouble (althouigh you really should automate the xml creation, since its not a reliably accurate process when done manually).

As the other poster said, if they require you to do SOAP protocol transactions or web-service-type interfaces to their server, you will need to hire some technical help.

Ian

 

[deepak]

Folks, thanks for the education. What is SOAP protocol
transaction? Thanks