Extension:External Data

The External Data extension allows MediaWiki pages to retrieve, filter, and format structured data from one or more sources. These sources can include external URLs, regular wiki pages, uploaded files, files on the local server, databases and LDAP directories.

The extension defines the following :
 * Data retrieval functions, which set local variables available with wikipage scope:
 * #get_web_data - retrieves CSV, GFF, JSON, XML, HTML or free-form data from a URL and assigns it to variables that can be accessed on the page.
 * #get_soap_data - retrieves data from a URL via the SOAP protocol.
 * #get_file_data - retrieves data from a file on the local server, in the same formats as #get_web_data.
 * #get_db_data - retrieves data from a database.
 * #get_ldap_data - retrieves data from an LDAP server.
 * #get_program_data - retrieves data returned by a program run server-side.
 * #get_external_data - a universal alias for any of the above functions.
 * Data handling functions, which display, store or clear previously set local variables:
 * #external_value - displays the value of any such variable.
 * #for_external_table - cycles through all the values retrieved for a set of variables, displaying the same "container" text for each one.
 * #store_external_table - cycles through a table of values, storing them as semantic data via the Semantic MediaWiki extension, by mimicking a call to SMW's #subobject function for each row.
 * #display_external_table - cycles through all the values retrieved for a set of variables, displaying each "row" using a template.
 * #clear_external_data - erases the current set of retrieved data.

It also defines the following Lua functions that retrieve data and return it as Lua tables. There is one-to-one correspondence between parser functions retrieving data and Lua functions evident from their names:

In tag emulation mode, webmaster can define additional parser tags.

This version of the External Data extension requires MediaWiki 1.28+.

Click through the pages in the navigation bar above to learn more about External Data, how it works, how to use it, and how to install it.