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Originally Posted by Madcoder
It's not my idea of a fun time, but yes I could do it. I was suggesting that I do a screen scrape (I don't have any xml file access where I am but rather some web pages with show information), and format the xml appropriately. I could mimic the format used by one of the existing supported sources for show data, and then use a hosts entry to trick the media box to actually poll my own source of data rather than the one specified in the plugin (unless that address is hackable in a file somewhere, but I haven't looked around for it to know yet). I was just hoping for some support directly for external sources.
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It isn't possible to write a generic format parser that does not require you to get deeply involved in the process of screen scraping, or data reformatting for each host for show information. You're going to need to do this, one way or another. OR.. the plugin will need to be hard coded and updated for each and every host of movie information and every time that source is updated. This is exactly what XSLT was made for, and it can be used to transform an HTML document just as well as an XML document. You won't need to screen scrape if it's a web page.
Maybe this is what you're suggesting and I'm missing it. Are you looking for this plugin to define an XML Schema for showtime information with an endpoint of sorts to allow for anyone else to write their own adaptor to fetch the information? If this is the case, it seems like it should be easy to support. Maybe it should be added as an XSLT call.. which will in turn be the trigger to fetch the updated information.
Hmm... I'm just starting to brush up on my XSLT.. I'm doing more examples to get better at it. Maybe this should be one of my examples to force me to learn a bit more....