France

Italy

Portugal

Spain

XML explained

Most property companies have a Website and these days the property details are stored in a 'database'. A database is a collection of information, an example of a database you may be familiar with is a telephone directory. A telephone directory stores information about the customers of the telephone company for a particular area. The data is stored in alphabetical order of the customers last name. Each customer is a 'record'. The 'fields' of a record hold the information. A telephone customer record could have the following fields: First Name, Last Name, Address, Postcode, Telephone Number. If this database was on a computer rather than in a printed book the data could be ordered in many ways: by first name, buy postcode, by address…

A computer database of property is similar. Each property is one record. That record will have fields to hold information: Reference number, description, price, town, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, plot size, distance to beach, etc…..The property lists and property pages on the companies website will be constructed by taking the relevant data from the database and displaying it on the appropriate web pages.

This works for thousands of websites, information stored in a database is used to dynamically build a webpage.

How can property details be shared between different companies? Each company has its own database, usually designed by a third party. There is no standard method of naming fields or even which fields are required. Some sites will call the property description field 'description' others will be 'details' others might be in a different language. Who said you must use English?

This is why companies like BuyPropertyinEurope have a specification for a special type of webpage called a 'feed' or XML. This is a webpage in a special format that can be 'read' by another website.

Lets look at a simple example…

This is what a basic XML Feed would look like if viewed in a browser.

Can you see '‹property›'? This is called a 'tag' and ids the start of a 'record'. Yes this is the property information taken from the database and displayed in 'tags' that label the contents. The next tag ‹id›is the unique database reference of this property the end of this 'field' is marked with a corresponding tag ‹id/› The tags should explain themselves. To recap an XML feed is a special webpage where data from databaseis displayed, for each record selected the field information is displayed between '‹tags›' that contain the contents of that field.

This information is 'parsed' or read by another website and the information is stored in that sites database. And that’s it! Not a great mystery!

Therefore to have your property available for BPE you will need to create (or your web designer) an XML feed page. It should take no longer to produce than an ordiary web page. Two hours work maximum.