Real Estate Manager has options to export your houses to CSV, XML and MySQL. In this article we will explain the XML Export and its results.

XML Explanation

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. Extensible because it allows its users to define their own elements. Its primary purpose is to help information systems share structured data, particularly via the Internet, and it is used both to encode documents and to serialize data. It is designed to be relatively human-legible.

Read more on XML on Wikipedia.

XML Export in Real Estate Manager

In the Admin backend, go to Components>Real Estate Manager> Import/Export and then click on the Export tab. With the dropdown boxes, choose XML as the Export Type and the Category to export from.

You will see the following page:

By clicking on the link, you can save the export file you just made to your local workstation. Change the name to reflect the category you are exporting:

XML Export from Real Estate Manager.

The XML file export can be opened with an appropriate text editor or XML editor of your choice and edited for subsequent import. Since XML files are quite human-readable, this is an excellent option. In the following screenshot we have opened the just exported XML file in PSPad, which is a fine freeware editor for Windows which supports ANSI, UTF-8 and has many cool options:

It is a good idea to do exports of your house categories every now and to keep them safe somewhere as a backup.PSPad is highly recommended and available from http://www.pspad.com. Make regular backups of your houses. This is certainly a good plan before changing Real Estate Manager version for example with an upgrade. With a small note of your House Category names and these exports, you can always restore your Real Estate Manager content easily.

We recommend exports to XML for this because:

They will contain all fields from your Real Estate Manager, including House.

They will give you the most flexible output (you can decide to later import into different categories, for example)

Descriptions and User Reviews

They are totally database structure independent, so if there any changes in the Real Estate Manager database tables structure in a later version (which may happen when new functionality is added), then with XML exports available it will not ruin the effectiveness of your subsequent imports.

For Full XML export please save all apartments images and edocuments files from folder: {yours site}/components/com_realestatemanager/edocuments/ and {yours site}/components/com_realestatemanager/images/ for next restore at import time.