eZ XML Export introduces a few concepts that are worth knowing:

Customer

This extension has been designed with enterprise concepts in mind. Basically you sell your content to another company as XML so it is easier for both parties to export and import new content. This is why we created the concept of “customer”. A customer in eZ XML Export is only a representation of what a customer could be in real life, with a name and a few words for description and a remote target accessible over FTP so you can upload exported contents automatically.

Export

An export is the entity which contains the definition of the content you want to export as XML. It is related to a customer and a customer can have an unlimited number of different exports.

Note that defining an export without creating a customer first is not possible.

Slicing mode

An export can be exported in two different modes :

•  «  N mode » : the export generates multiple files for export, usually it is one file per exported content object. Once the export has been done the XSLT transformation is applied on each file.
•  « 1 mode » : the export generates one file which will contain all the exported content objects. Once those objects are exported the XSLT transformation will be applied on this single file only.

FTP target

It is possible to define an FTP target for both a customer and an export. This target is composed of a standard connection string. The eZ XML Export is able to choose the correct FTP information based upon what has been configured. If there is an FTP connection string for an export, this one will be used, otherwise the one defined for the customer will be used. If you do not need to upload anything over FTP, then you can leave the according form fields empty or disable the FTPShipment setting in the ezxmlexport.ini file of your eZ Publish installation, like this:

[FTPSettings]
FTPShipment=disabled

Compression

It is possible to compress the whole export when the « 1 mode » or « N mode » is used. The only compression format available for now is .tar.gz which is a standard compression format.

XSLT transformation

Once content objects have been exported, it is possible to transform the generated XML schema compatible file into any other XML file by using a dedicated XSLT file.

Related object handling

Two modes can be chosen to handle related objects :

•  Level 1 : related objects are only referenced by their nodeID in the export file
•  Level 2 : related objects are exported as well but only if the content class they belong to is defined as exportable.