XML Publishing with AxKit

Custom Providers

By default, AxKit presumes that the documents that it is serving and processing are stored as plain files on the filesystem. While this is typically adequate for most cases, in some situations you may need to get data from another source. In AxKit, the mechanism for slurping in data for further processing is called a Provider.

Providers come in two flavors: ContentProviders and StyleProviders. As their names suggest, ContentProviders are responsible for fetching the source of the content being delivered, while StyleProviders handle getting the source of the stylesheets to be used to transform that content. The default class for both types, Apache::AxKit::Provider::File, reads data from XML sources on the filesystem. Alternate classes can be configured for both the ContentProvider and the StyleProvider for a given resource using the corresponding AxKit configuration directive:

# Set each type of Provider explicitly
AxContentProvider My::Provider
AxStyleProvider My::Other::Provider

# Or, configure both to use the same alternate class
AxProvider My::Generic::Provider

Custom Providers can be used to fetch content from non-XML data, to get XML data from sources other than flat files, or a combination of the two. In some cases, you are looking to take advantage of Perl’s capable XML tools and other data processing facilities to generate an XML instance based on another source of data. In others, you simply want to read in XML for a source other than a plain file on the disk. ...