Symphony.

Hi all

In theory, does anyone see any potential problems with creating an External Data Source where the URL is a page generated by the same Symphony site? A crude method of Data Source caching.

For instance if the site is: www.example.com And an XML page is generated by Symphony at: www.example.com/data/xmlfeed

Would it cause any problems to include this feed in another Symphony page via an External DS where caching is leveraged via $dsParamCACHE?

Thoughts welcomed.

JL

I don't think there should be any issues; however I wonder what would the advantages be. Since the data is clearly available through other data-sources, and you are potentially exposing your XMLfeed unless this is deemed as public.

If your main reason would be the cache - maybe you might be interested in looking at Nick Dunn's [Cacheable Datasource][1]

Would it cause any problems to include this feed in another Symphony page via an External DS where caching is leveraged via $dsParamCACHE

Nope, I do this quite a lot. I think I had a configuration error once whereby CURL couldn't resolve requests back to the same server, but that was a long time ago.

Thanks for the replies, I will certainly check out Cacheable Datasource which looks good.

One of the advantages of the method above is that your feed could include multiple Data Sources (both external and native) and therefore reduce them down to a single cached request.

[I was experiencing a problem on one of my sites (another thread altogether) and I wanted to rule this out as a potential problem area.]

Cheers

I've done it plenty of times to link external data to internal Symphony data to run through XML Importers. It's what I think Symphony is great for, you can loop back through and supply XML to your pages/clients/system in a very unique way, or, well, anything really.

If you do it right, the overhead isn't even a problem.