Building an XML view

You may want to return your data at some point in a format other than HTML. For this, CakePHP comes with the ability to use data views. By default, the framework includes data view for XML, JSON, and RSS, but you can also build your own, handling content as required by your output format.

In this recipe, we'll use XmlView to generate an XML output of some records from a model.

Getting ready

We first need a table of data to work with. Create a table named news using the following SQL statement:

CREATE TABLE news (
  id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  title VARCHAR(50),
  summary TEXT,
  created DATETIME,
  PRIMARY KEY(id)
);

Then, run the following SQL statement to insert some news into our table:

INSERT INTO news (title, summary, created)
VALUES
('CakePHP on top', 'Nominated as the best framework!', NOW()),
('Facebook buys Twitter', 'Mark becomes the first zillionaire', NOW()),
('The Larry peak', 'Founder of CakePHP admits beer helped his code', NOW());

Before we start, we'll...