Structuring Your Data

You can use any data format so long as it is XML.

The data file can be structured however you like – there’s no required schema. The only rule is that it must be well-formed XML. Other formats (CSV, Excel) can be converted to XML using the Lua filter.

Recommendations

If you can influence the data structure, here are some practical tips:

1. Put data where you need it. If article details are printed on the article page, the data should be structured by article, not by property type.

2. Make variants recognizable. If a new article group should start on a new page, make the group boundary visible in the data structure.

3. Be explicit. If an article number like 123-12345 encodes the group in the first three digits, break it out as an attribute instead of parsing it at runtime.

4. Redundancy is fine. Saving the full article number on each item is better than assembling it from group + suffix every time.

Example structure

<productdata>
  <globalsettings>
    ...
  </globalsettings>
  <articlegroup name="interior lights" number="123">
    <article number="123-12345">
      <property1>...</property1>
      <property2>...</property2>
    </article>
    <article number="123-12346">
      <property1>...</property1>
      <property2>...</property2>
    </article>
  </articlegroup>
  <articlegroup name="exterior lights" number="124">
    <article number="124-23456">
      <property1>...</property1>
    </article>
  </articlegroup>
</productdata>

Accessing data from the layout

XTS uses <Record> to match elements from the data file. When XTS encounters an element, it looks for a <Record> with a matching element attribute and executes the commands inside.

Within a record, you use XPath expressions to access attributes and child elements:

• @nr – the nr attribute of the current element
• description – the description child element
• image/@mainimage – the mainimage attribute of the image child

See How It Works for the full processing model and XPath for the expression language.