Creating XML files from a template

I've been maintaining a TeamSite (v 6.7.1) Installation for a client. I've been a web developer for a while, but I'm fairly new to TeamSite.

Anyway, I have found that they have in a .tpl file for a data type that generates a chunk of XML in Perl and then outputs it to an xml file that is placed in the xml directory.

If you generate a DCR it would go through this .tpl and effectively generate an XML file. I'm sure this isn't best practices, but it's the code that was written before I looked at the site.

Anyway, the issue. It seems that this process seems to fail for certain DCRs. They don't regenerate the xml files.

So my question is why? I looked at the permissions on the DCRs and XML files that seem to not be working. They seem to be the same. Is there a certain permission that files would need to be writeable by Perl? Is there an error log that I could find somewhere that would maybe report errors that happened during the generation process?

Thanks and I hope this makes sense.

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Comments

nipper

you are not providing enough information to help debug.

The approach is not a bad one, it could be simplified but unless one looks at the setup it is tough to offer improvements.

As to the bug, you give no details why it does not create XML.

One guess is that you are not encoding special characters (i.e. & amp; instead of &)

rmcgrew

So basically this is what happens.

The template for these dcrs has a tag in which it builds a string in the variable $xmlOutput. This string is XML which has information that it pulls from another set of DCRs in another directory. It then executes this command

open XML_OUT, ">$outputXmlFile";
print XML_OUT $xmlOutput;
close XML_OUT;

This is, obviously, where it outputs the contents of $xmlOutput to the file. I can't say for sure where it is failing. I just know that the XML file is not over written.

I would guess that XML entities aren't an issue here because a Perl string wouldn't care about that.

Is there some variety of Debug Log I could print to? Or is there an error log where I could maybe see what might be going on?

Pawan

...
open XML_OUT, ">$outputXmlFile";
print XML_OUT $xmlOutput;
close XML_OUT;
...

Try this

open XML_OUT, ">OUTPUTXmlFile" or die $!;

and see what is the output. Try with a different filename in different path.

nipper

So basically this is what happens.

The template for these dcrs has a tag in which it builds a string in the variable $xmlOutput. This string is XML which has information that it pulls from another set of DCRs in another directory. It then executes this command

open XML_OUT, ">$outputXmlFile";
print XML_OUT $xmlOutput;
close XML_OUT;

This is, obviously, where it outputs the contents of $xmlOutput to the file. I can't say for sure where it is failing. I just know that the XML file is not over written.

I would guess that XML entities aren't an issue here because a Perl string wouldn't care about that.

Is there some variety of Debug Log I could print to? Or is there an error log where I could maybe see what might be going on?

OK, then the permissions on the destination file are hosed. Use the die command that was posted, & then consider rewriting this, because I will bet you are going to have a lot more trouble and this is really quire simple.

smwangi

I would have the tpl output a separate xml that you could specify explicitly in the .tpl/perl. And leave the teamsite.xml (generated data record) alone.