Back in the early part of this year I posted an article around how to get MySQL data out of the database and into a web page via jQuery and Ajax. The tutorial was okay, but I made some rookie mistakes – specifically around the creation of XML data with PHP – This time, I hope to rectify that!
So this article will focus on getting data from a database using PHP, converting that to an XML document, and reading that XML in through jQuery via Ajax calls. Seems complex, but is in fact, very easy.
Database Design
This tutorial assumes you know how to connect to your database. It also assumes that you have a table setup called “people” with 3 columns: “title”, “firstname” and “surname”. Please enter some data into this table as it will be required.
The XML structure
So, the point of this tutorial is to read some XML with an Ajax call from jQuery, therefore we need to structure our data correctly. Here is an example of the structure our XML document will generate:
