Using external XML files

FSI Pages by default reads the IPTC Metadata of the images to retrieve the link and tooltip information to display. Using external XML files is an alternative way to provide FSI Pages with hyperlink and tool tip data.

Generating XML files using FSI Pages Converter

As mentioned above, by default FSI Pages Converter writes the link information to the IPTC metadata of the images it creates.
If you enable the XML output of FSI Pages Converter, it will create a single XML file for each image which contains the link and text information. The XML will have a file name based on the scheme [filename].tif.xml and contains something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<page number="1">
      <links>
      <area tip="Link tooltip" url="http://www.example.com/example.html">
            <shape coords="0.286,0.4472,0.286,0.4295,0.3637,0.4295,0.3637,0.4472"/>
            <text>
            Link text / description
            </text>
      </area>
      </links>
</page>

 

Configuring FSI Pages

You will need to define the XMLBase parameter to define the URL for FSI Pages to load the XML files. If the images contain IPTC metadata, you may need to set ForceXMLDataFiles parameter as well (version 5.0.0 and above), because FSI Pages loads XML files by default only, if there is no IPTC meta data in the images.
So your configuration should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fsi_parameter>

      <!-- Other entries removed for demonstration purposes -->

      <plugin src="pages" >
            <ForceXMLDataFiles value="true" />
            <XMLBase value="http://www.example.com/xmlfiles/" />
      </plugin>

</fsi_parameter>

This will force FSI Pages to load the XML file located at http://www.example.com/xmlfiles/page0001.tif.xml when displaying the image page0001.tif. The file page0002.tif.xml will be retrieved for page0002.tif etc.

Crossdomain Considerations

Please note that Adobe Flash Player can – by default – not retrieve XML data from a foreign domain. This is: an FSI Viewer instance located at http://somedomain/fsi.swf is not allowed to read XML data from http://anotherdomain/data.xml. In addition to that, Adobe Flash Player does not resolve domains to IP addresses. So do not mix adressing via IP addresses and domains.

To work around, that you need to request XML data from an other domain than you are loading FSI Viewer from, add a crossdomain policy file to the root directory of the domain your server side script resides in, e.g. http://anotherdomain/crossdomain.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain="*" secure="false" />
</cross-domain-policy>