Custom Web Publishing with XML and XSLT

Chapter 4
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Accessing XML data with the Web Publishing Engine 37
About UTF-8 encoded data
All XML data generated by the Web Publishing Engine is encoded in UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation 8
Bit) format. This format compresses data from the standard Unicode format of 16 bits to 8 bits for ASCII
characters. XML parsers are required to support Unicode and UTF-8 encoding.
UTF-8 encoding includes direct representations of the values of 0-127 for the standard ASCII set of
characters used in English, and provides multibyte encodings for Unicode characters with higher values.
Note Be sure to use a web browser or text editor program that supports UTF-8 files.
The UTF-8 encoding format includes the following features:
1 All ASCII characters are one-byte UTF-8 characters. A legal ASCII string is a legal UTF-8 string.
1 Any non-ASCII character (any character with the high-order bit set) is part of a multibyte character.
1 The first byte of any UTF-8 character indicates the number of additional bytes in the character.
1 The first byte of a multibyte character is easily distinguished from the subsequent byte, which makes it
is easy to locate the start of a character from an arbitrary position in a data stream.
1 It is easy to convert between UTF-8 and Unicode.
1 The UTF-8 encoding is relatively compact. For text with a large percentage of ASCII characters, it is
more compact than Unicode. In the worst case, a UTF-8 string is only 50% larger than the corresponding
Unicode string.
Using FileMaker query strings to request XML data
To request XML data from a FileMaker database, you use the FileMaker query commands and parameters
in a query string. For example, you can use the –findall query command in the following query string in a
URL to request a list of all products in a FileMaker database named “products”:
http://192.168.123.101/fmi/xml/fmresultset.xml?–db=products–lay=sales&–findall
A query string must contain only one query command, such as –new. Most query commands also require
various matching query parameters in the query string. For example, all query commands except –dbnames
require the –db parameter that specifies the database to query.
You can also use query commands and parameters in a URL or in a <?xslt–cwp–query?> processing
instruction in a FileMaker XSLT stylesheet. See
chapter 6, “Developing FileMaker XSLT stylesheets.”
This section contains a summary of the FileMaker query commands and parameters. For more information
about using them in a query string, see
appendix A, “Valid names used in query strings.”
Note The Web Publishing Engine also supports an additional query command (–process) and three query
parameters that are defined for use only with FileMaker XSLT stylesheets. See
“Using query strings in
FileMaker XSLT stylesheets” on page 54.
Use this query command name To execute this command
–dbnames Retrieve names of all hosted and web-shared databases.
–delete Delete record.
–dup Duplicate record.
–edit Edit record.