Project File

A project file is an XML file which stores database information and settings of a particular project. It can be used as a good save-and-restart point for the customization process and is also useful as a trace in case of problematic generation. It is therefore a good practice to save a project file for each site you work with.

Like other XML document, project file is human-legible. You should be able to open a project file in any text editor. With a basic understanding of XML, you should be able to read an XML file and change the settings.

Each template object is represented by an XML node in the project file. The object properties are saved as attributes of the node. The property name is same as the attribute name.

XML documents can contain foreign characters, it requires encoding so the data can be read by XML parser properly. The encoding of the project file is auto-detected by our products according to your computer regional setting. Generally, the detected encoding should be compatible with your language. If not, you can override the auto-detected setting by explicitly setting an encoding to the registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\<product name>\<version>\Settings
Value name: XMLEncodeCharSet

Note: XML file cannot include characters that are not belonged to the specified XML encoding. Therefore, do not enter special characters in your project setting. For example, iso-8859-1 does not include the euro dollar sign. If you copy and paste an euro dollar sign from somewhere else to the project setting, error will occur when you save the project and the project file may become corrupted. If you need to use those characters, always use the HTML entities, e.g. use "&euro;" for the euro dollar sign.

 

Project Name

Each project file has a project name. By default the file name (without extension) of the project file is used as project name. Before you name your project file when saving it for the first time, a temporary name, Project<n>, where n is a number, is used. The project name is an important property, it is used in the generated codes to identify your project.

Note: It is recommended that only alphanumerical characters is used in project name.

When you want to create a new project based on an existing project, you can use [Save As...] under the [Project] menu. If [Save As...] is used, the project name is changed to same as the new project file name.

If you want to create a backup copy or another version of an existing project, use [Save a Copy...] to save the file with another name. If [Save a Copy...] is used, the project name is not changed, so the project name is not same as the file name anymore. However, with the same project name, scripts generated from these different project files will still work with each other like they are generated from the same project file.

If you use IIS (Internet Information Services), our products can create virtual directory for your project. The project name is used as virtual directory alias as well as the path under the default Web site of IIS. Therefore, if you want to create a virtual directory with a specific name, you can change the project name using [Save As...] first. Alternatively, enter your [Virtual directory alias] in the Generate Setup page. (See Generate Setup)

How to Check the Project Name of a Project File

There are 2 ways to check the project name:

  1. Open your project file with the product, see the caption, the project name is shown as <Product Name> - <Project Name>, for example, if the caption is "PHP XMLMaker - demo", the project name is "demo".

  2. Open the project file with a text editor (e.g. Notepad), the project name can be found in the <project> tag, check the "ProjName" attribute, for example, if the <project> tag reads <Project Version="x.x.x.x." ProjName="demo" ...(omitted).../>, the project name of the project is "demo".

 

Demo Projects

After viewing the demo site, you may want to open the demo projects and see how the projects are setup. The demo projects are installed at "projects" subfolder under your installation folder, i.e. typically "C:\Program Files\PHP XMLMaker\projects". If you have installed PHP XMLMaker at another folder or you use non English version of Windows, the path may be different. To use the demo projects:

  1. Create the demo database using the SQL script (xmldemo.sql) provided in the projects folder,
  2. Open the demo project with PHP XMLMaker,
  3. Go to Database tab, change the connection info,
  4. Click Tools->Synchronize to update the project,
  5. Go to the Generate tab, change the paths of Template file, Application root folder and Destination folder to the correct paths on your system,
  6. If you use IIS and you have not created the virtual directory yet, you can check Create IIS virtual directory and let PHP XMLMaker create it for you,
  7. Check Browse after generation if you want PHP XMLMaker to open your browser automatically after generation,
  8. Save the project,
  9. Click the Generate button to generate scripts.

 

Also See:

Template Object Properties

 
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