Help: ideas or "a canvas" to create a. efx translator for php language

[fabiodisconzi]

Dear All,
I have worked for year(s) to this idea but I am not able to translate .efx template in a list of php xpath query. My target is to take a template and create a list of functions for parsing the xml-notice.
Could you give me some advice on how to achieve the target?

I read that the sdk has a translator but I don't knwo java.

Any template or a sort of canvas to follow in order to solve the problem?
Thanks.
Fabio

[Storm-Dev6]

Hi @fabiodisconzi 👋

Thanks for your question — your project sounds very interesting!

From what I understand, your goal is to translate .efx templates (used in the eForms SDK) into PHP functions using XPath to extract data from XML notices. You're not familiar with Java, so you're looking for a kind of "starter template" or "canvas" in PHP to help you get going

✅ Suggested approach
You could try the following steps:

Understand the structure of .efx templates
.efx files are usually XML files themselves, describing how to extract certain information from eForms XML notices using XPath.

Write a PHP parser to read .efx files
You can use SimpleXMLElement or DOMDocument in PHP to load and parse the .efx files.

Extract XPath expressions from the .efx
Look for attributes like select="..." or other tags that contain XPath logic.

Use those XPath expressions to build PHP functions
For example:

function extractTitle($xml) {
$xpath = new DOMXPath($xml);
return $xpath->evaluate('string(//cbc:Title)');
}

🧪 Example "canvas" in PHP

function loadXml($xmlFilePath) {
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->load($xmlFilePath);
return new DOMXPath($doc);
}

function extractField(DOMXPath $xpath, string $expression) {
return $xpath->evaluate("string($expression)");
}

Example usage:
$xpath = loadXml("notice.xml");
$title = extractField($xpath, "//cbc:Title");
echo "Title: $title";

🔧 Tip
You might want to look into the TED eForms SDK and especially how .efx templates are structured — even if you don’t use Java, understanding their logic will help.

If someone in the community has already written a .efx → PHP translator, that could be a good starting point. But if not, your effort might become the first!

Let me know if you'd like help with a working prototype — I'd be glad to assist!