🚀 go-pugleaf

I just did a job that seems to be the kind that XML was made for but the urgency of the project dictated that I use tried and true methods with which I am familiar, so I eschewed the XML approach.

But had I wanted to use it, I still don't have a clue how I would have gone about it. The job was a catalog. Each item in the catalog was part of a complex structure, in each section of the catalog, there were:

Product Family (between 10 and 200+ per section)
-Products (between 1 and 4 per family)
--Formats (between 1 and 12 per product)
---Packages (between 1 and 4 per format)

The design was elaborate. The only way I could see to execute it was to take the various components of the design and make templates which I put into a library. Each template consisted of a group of backgrounds (made up of interlocking rounded polygons) and text frames. I took the data into the frames, adjusting their height to fit the data and then adjusting the backgrounds to fit the frame heights, taking into account some restrictions about minimum height for certain elements.

So I processed the text stream a paragraph at a time, moving the text into the appropriate text frames of a copy of the appropriate template, and keeping everything in order by making them inline to a main story.

One part of my mind says that this is what XML is for, but another part says how would XML know which templates to grab and how would it know to resize the various interrelated geometries?

What should I read to help me understand this? The documents on the subject all start with workflows that don't seem to fit my model.