This is my first post in the forum so thanks in advance for your help! The problem we are having is that all of our valuable product content information exists primarily in InDesign and we need a way to parse it out to store in our database. We have a very capable programming staff that is quite familiar with parsing XML but the .idms file which we are able to export appears to have a very complex schema and we are hoping to find an existing API for parsing these types of files. Has anyone tried to do this before? We have our entire product catalog in 22 languages embedded in these files and we'd like to avoid hand-keying this data back into our database. Preferably we'd like to use a C# .NET or java API. Thanks so much!
In short, no, I don't think you're going to find an API for parsing IDMS files (which are a special-case of IDML files).
I assume you're well aware that the IDML is fairly well documented in the InDesign SDK.
My experience is that it's not too terribly tough to parse the files to get out any particular thing. It's when you try to be comprehensive that you get into trouble...
Have you looked at InDesign's XML export? That gives you very simply output.
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