Problem:
I am to build a web-based tool in PHP to help users access information scattered across a collection of XML files that I plan to store data from into tables in MySQL. A lot of examples I see online seem to be based on importing data from a bunch of XML files that all use the same formatting. I do not have that luxury.
How would I be able to parse through XML files that have the following factors?
Expected Results:
Using an example where the collection of XML is about a group of people, if you search for "brown eyes", you get search results listing pages for everyone listed with brown eyes. One of the pages is "Robert". If you click this result, you'll go to a page where all the information from Robert's XML file is displayed (readable formatting to be handled later).
you could only create a self-learning parser, which adds new columns to the table whenever it finds new properties in the XML
. basically there are two options available: either build up a data model, which at some point in time matches all the records - or stuff the mess into a noSQL database, which does not necessarily make the mess any better. "one size fits all" (stuffing unstructured data into a structured database) is not an option.