Posted by Paul Lautman on 01/20/08 14:15

Jerry Stuckle wrote:
> Paul Lautman wrote:
>> I need to get some data from a MSSQL database via an asp server, to
>> display in a php generated page. I don't want to pre-format the data
>> from a display pov, as that means going to the asp server whenever I
>> want to change it.
>> This data will be a few information fields (e.g.
>> total_number_of_rows_found, number_of_rows_per_page,
>> current_page_number) plus the columns/rows actually returned by the
>> query (I guess I really only need to know total_number_of_rows_found
>> as I will be supplying the other information as input parms, but
>> this gives the general idea).
>> I am pleasantly in the exact opposite situation as normally found
>> here, in that I can control the sending asp script as well as the
>> receiving php one (although, whilst I may not be anywhere near an
>> expert php programmer, my php/MySQL skills far outweigh my asp/MSSQL
>> ones!).
>> An obvious choice of communications protocol is xml, but does anyone
>> have any other ideas of neat ways to package up the data at the asp
>> end, to make it easy to access over on the php side?
>>
>>
>>
>
> Paul,
>
> I've found xml is about the best for things like this.
>
> I implemented something similar for a non-profit a while back. Their
> local chapters needed access to a subset of the database, but they
> didn't want to make the database accessible via the internet. So I
> just built some xml2 pages for them to fetch and supplied some cURL
> code for them to get what they wanted. The DOM functions in PHP
> allowed them to parse the data as they wished.
>
> The only real problem was building "well-formed" xml. I didn't find
> any good tools for VBScript for building the xml, but it wasn't all
> that hard.

Good old Microsoft (one doesn't often have a reason to say that!) has got
the best summary of that that I have found:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281099

I was sort of wondering about a JSON style protocol, only in php speak,
except that that would I guess entail an eval(), which maybe isn't the best
approach.

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