To get the database to refresh periodically you would need to run your PHP script from the server on a scheduled task/ cron job. Some web hosts allow you do this. But thats if you want to refresh once an hour or something

Although everytime you call your XML in the example its actually calling that PHP page and running the query each time so its currently realtime but your browser is caching the result so you don’t see the updates.

However with XML there is caching and a ‘time to live’ (TTL) before the content expires in the browser. If these values aren’t set in the XML output of the PHP page then the XML object will be cached so you won’t see the change.

To alter this you can add in the XML parameters (I think) for TTL much like an RSS feed. But you can also force the XML to always render from the server and not the browser cache by adding a time stamp to the query URL so the browser always sees it as a unique file therefore it will always update.

So try changing the URL you query in the ajax/spry call to:

var timestamp=getTime();
var url=”queryBuilder.php”;
url=url+”?q=”+str+”&ts=”+timestamp;

Then the query is always unique – I think and that *should* force the browser to avoid using the cache, although that may mean it starts caching each new request.

Anyway hope that helps you out, I can’t currently test my theory as I’m at work.

Larry

the link below shows how to get spry to check its xml file source periodically. but i’m stuck on what to do to get the database re-queried and the xml file updated regularly:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/articles/data_set_overview/