Symphony.

I have a dynamic data source that grabs articles from an external resource. For the site I need search functionality: Does anybody know if there is a way to parse my external XML and make it searchable (with PHP in an extension or using XSLT itself)?

If I enter keywords that parser should only return nodes containing the search terms.

The simplest way would be using XSLT:

my-external-ds/entry[contains(*,$search-term)]

Which will find any entry where a child node contains a certain piece of text. Alternatively you might want to pull the feed into a Symphony section at which point you could query it using regexp from a Data Source.

Or if you are comfortable writing PHP you could write a script which opens the PHP, parses the nodes and uses a preg_match on each node text() so that you can match with a regular expression. This script would then return the XML that matches your search — a middle-man.

If you go into PHP, I believe the SimpleXML api will let you apply XPath as well.

Yes indeed. Although I think contains() is case-specific though. But it depends on the type of search you need to do.

Thanks guys, I’ll think about the different solutions.