Zend RESTful XML Generic Functions

Chris Danielson — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:07:58 +0000

It has been argued that the Zend RESTful API should not only automate the JSON data returned (which it does a fine job of), but automate the XML data. Unfortunately, the Zend engine doesn’t do this for REST. The solution is left to the developer to implement their own strategy. In my opinion, there is no better place for a simple recursive function that will dynamically crawl the returned objects and arrays and generate XML in a way that just makes sense. As was promised in a comment from one of my previous blogs, here is a set of functions that works well for dynamically generating XML from your PHP objects and arrays. It’s been pointed out that this process should have been included in the Zend framework. As of this writing, I believe that it still has not been implemented. Anyways, here it is. Take note that you really only need two functions from this post getXML(…) and _xmlHelper(…)

^?Download BaseController.php

abstract class BaseController extends Zend_Rest_Controller
{
//Please know that the init() method has been snipped out.	
 
	public static function getXML($obj)
    {
    	$doc = new DOMDocument();
		$doc->formatOutput = true;
		$root_element = $doc->createElement("response");
		$doc->appendChild($root_element);
 
    	foreach($obj as $var => $value) {
        	$statusElement = $doc->createElement($var);
			if (!is_array($value)) {
				$statusElement->appendChild($doc->createTextNode($value));
				$root_element->appendChild($statusElement);
			} else {
				BaseController::_xmlHelper(&$doc, &$root_element, &$statusElement, &$value);
			}
		}
		print $doc->saveXML();
    }
	public static function _xmlHelper(&$doc, &$root_element, &$statusElement, &$value) {
		if (is_array($value)) {
			foreach ($value as $key => $val) {
				if (is_array($val)) {
					BaseController::_xmlHelper(&$doc, &$root_element, &$statusElement, $val);
				} else if (is_object($val)) {
					$se = $doc->createElement(str_replace('object','',get_class($val)));
					$arr = get_object_vars($val);
					BaseController::_xmlHelper(&$doc, &$root_element, &$se, $arr);
					$root_element->appendChild($se);
 
				} else {
					//print $key . " => " . $val . "\n";
					$se = $doc->createElement($key);
					$se->appendChild($doc->createTextNode($val));
					$statusElement->appendChild($se);
				}
			}
			//print_r($value);
		} else {
			$statusElement->appendChild($doc->createTextNode($value));
			$root_element->appendChild($statusElement);
		}
	}
}

Now the only thing left to do is show an example implementation.

^?View Code PHP

class VersionController extends BaseController 
{ 
/*  implement the methods as show in the blog referenced at the top of this blog post */
public function init()
    {
       $this->view->hello = array('a'=>'1', 'b'=>'2');
    }
}

Now, the last thing to do is edit the view for the XML document which would be in this case:

/application/views/scripts/version/index.xml.phtml

The index.xml.phtml should then only contain:

^?View Code PHP


BaseController::getXML($this);
?>

This will automate the process of generating the XML data you want returned. It’s an easy way to quickly and effectively get XML without having to rebuild the entire wheel. Feel free to modify and distribute.

Chris Danielson's Blog » recursive

Zend RESTful XML Generic Functions