Practical PostgreSQL

Core Features

LXP provides a core set of features that include external file inclusion, XML parsing, and a direct SQL interface to PostgreSQL. As of Version 0.8, SQL execution is performed with either a dynamic or persistent connection to the PostgreSQL RDBMS.

LXP also supports a few more advanced techniques commonly found in programming languages, such as variable setting, insertion and substitution, arrays, branching logic, loop iteration, and a basic search-and-replace variable formatting interface.

Content Inclusion and Management

The essential concept of content inclusion is that other files, or sources of data, can be included (e.g., inserted or embedded) within a requested document’s HTML output. Instructing an LXP document to include another file means that the output from that included file will appear inline, as if it had been part of the originally requested document itself. This can aid both the efficiency and maintainability of a large, dynamic web site.

LXP can natively include a variety of external files, from plain HTML, to XML, to token-delimited flat files. However, one of the strongest features of LXP’s content inclusion capability is that LXP can embed any content type that your Apache web server has been configured to handle.

Earlier incarnations of LXP had somewhat rigid support for the inclusion of PHP scripts. As of Version 0.8, however, LXP can include any available content type via Apache subrequests. This allows you to embed server-side documents written ...