Pull XML from different server

Hi all, I'm seriously new and only came across this site by accident so please bear with me.

I want to pull and display an xml from a different server.

The XML has 2 fields, "Link" and "Description", thats it, nothing else BUT this xml is populated dynamically with 50,000+ records every single day within a 2 hour window and then the records are gone at the end of the 2 hours to show zero records.

What I would like to do is instead of having just a straight line of records in virtual mode (because I understand its much faster to display), is to have grid displayed but have it 3 wide (6 cells) so that I can show 3 times as much.

Example: 6 cells, 3 for description and 3 for link with each description beside its corresponding link so it would look like this

Link | Descrip |Link | Descrip |Link | Descrip |
Link | Descrip |Link | Descrip |Link | Descrip |
Link | Descrip |Link | Descrip |Link | Descrip | etc

I also do NOT want the whole list to load first, I would like it populated on the fly so a refresh feature would have to be implemented every 3-5 seconds.

I hope that makes sense.! Now I don't speak javascriptese and I'm sure I can't be the only person out there who has wanted something like this.

My email is toby@t2racing.net for faster communication.

This place rocks!

Thanks

Anyone???

I don't see how you could do this without a lot of programming. Perhaps a CGI script to fetch the XML and edit it to convert 2 columns into 6.

I'd recommend using a PHP HTTP request to the remote server to pull the xml file. After you get the contents of the file use php to format the data into a javascript array or JSON object that you can return to your display page that has the format you want. Then just display it either using virtual mode, or you can try some sneaky setTimeout function to append data to your activewidgets object.

Good luck on this one.