etcetera
07 Jan 2010, 03:50 PM
I've been using software called Movie Collector to catalog a DVD collection for a store, and it has an option to display the catalog on their website for a monthly charge, but I hate the way it's displayed. It's only searchable by genre, not actors or directors (even though this is part of the catalog), and it won't display any of the plot descriptions for the films, which is really important for my purposes. The software will, however, export the catalog to an XML file. So my question is: is there any software out there that will make it easy for me to take that XML file and display it, and have it searchable/browsable by different categories like actor, director, title, genre, AND display the full contents of each film entry? I've found tutorials on displaying simple XML pages as a formatted list, but I'm looking for something a little more complex and searchable. Here's the website that Movie Collector synchronizes with, using their demo collection as an example:
http://connect.collectorz.com/users/demo/movies
You can see how the list is only browsable by genre, format, region, collection status, and "seen it." The last 4 I'm not even interested in. Also, if you type a director or actor's name in the search box, it displays no results even if you use one of the names you see on the front page. And when you click on one of the movies in the list, it doesn't show you a description of the movie, even though this info is catalogued in the xml file.
Anyone know where I can find something that will do a better job of searching an XML file??? I'm making a joomla based site and there are free "extensions" for cataloging a DVD collection, but none of those display the information I need either, and they create their own xml files (I think), since they don't load pre-existing ones. Does this make any sense? It seems like it shouldn't be that complicated to be able to search all different fields in an XML data file....right?
http://connect.collectorz.com/users/demo/movies
You can see how the list is only browsable by genre, format, region, collection status, and "seen it." The last 4 I'm not even interested in. Also, if you type a director or actor's name in the search box, it displays no results even if you use one of the names you see on the front page. And when you click on one of the movies in the list, it doesn't show you a description of the movie, even though this info is catalogued in the xml file.
Anyone know where I can find something that will do a better job of searching an XML file??? I'm making a joomla based site and there are free "extensions" for cataloging a DVD collection, but none of those display the information I need either, and they create their own xml files (I think), since they don't load pre-existing ones. Does this make any sense? It seems like it shouldn't be that complicated to be able to search all different fields in an XML data file....right?