Parse XML File that is Dyanamically Generated - php

Question

I am integrating the API from our monitoring software (PRTG) into our website and attempting to use a function that generates a list of data in XML format. As it is generated as needed, the URL doesn't point to an existing file.
I tried using "simplexml_load_file" and "simplexml_load_string" and passing the URL with no luck. I've also tried use "file_put_contents" to first save the file, but it also fails since the URL doesn't actually point to a file.
How can this be made to work?
<?php
$prtg_url = "http://prtg.domain.net:8080/";
$prtg_user = "username";
$prtg_hash = "passwordhash";
function getSensorData($deviceid)
{
$sensor_xml_file = $GLOBALS['prtg_url'] . "api/table.xml?content=sensors&output=xml&columns=objid,type,device,sensor,status&id=" . $deviceid . "&username=" . $GLOBALS['prtg_user'] . "&passhash=" . $GLOBALS['prtg_hash'];
file_put_contents("sensor.xml", fopen($sensor_xml_file, 'r'));
$sensors = simplexml_load_file("sensor.xml");
foreach ($sensors->item as $sensor)
{
$sensor_ping = $sensor->ping;
$sensor_id = $sensor->objid;
$sensor_type = $sensor->type;
$sensor_typeraw = $sensor->type_raw;
echo $sensor_ping . "</br>";
echo $sensor_id . "</br>";
echo $sensor_type . "</br>";
echo $sensor_typeraw . "</br>";
}
}
getSensorData("3401");
?>

Answer 1

It may be something to do with the file handler. You could try using simplexml_load_file() with your URL. For example:
$url = $GLOBALS['prtg_url']
. "api/table.xml?content=sensors&output=xml&columns=objid,type,device,sensor,status&id="
. $deviceid . "&username=" . $GLOBALS['prtg_user']
. "&passhash=" . $GLOBALS['prtg_hash']);
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);

Answer 2

try this:
$c = curl_init();
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, $sensor_xml_file);
$xmlString = curl_exec($c);
curl_close($c);
$sensors = simplexml_load_string($xmlString);

Answer 3

$opts = array('http' =>
array(
'method' => 'GET',
'header' => "Content-Type: text/xml\r\n",
'timeout' => 60
)
);
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$url = $GLOBALS['prtg_url']
. "api/table.xml?content=sensors&output=xml&columns=objid,type,device,sensor,status&id="
. $deviceid . "&username=" . $GLOBALS['prtg_user']
. "&passhash=" . $GLOBALS['prtg_hash']);
$result = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);
echo $results;
This forces a 60 second timeout on the operation, that way you can see if it actually fetches any results. If it does return incomplete results, switch to using XMLReader for your parser.