Coldfusion RETS Goals

Prior to diving into parsing the metadata, I should clarify what the initial goal of this project is. While my line of work will have me doing all kinds of interesting things with RETS, I think the best approach here is to keep it simple. To that end,  I am going to build an application that allows for a dynamic search form to be created by the client, execute the search, and see the results in a presentable manner. This will require the following.

• Authenticate on the RETS server
• Compare the current metadata version to what we have stored.
• If our metadata is outdated or we don't have it yet, grab the metadata.
• Created a form-builder that uses the metadata for it's source.
• Parse the form submission into a DMQL2 query.
• Present the result.

You may have notice in my earlier post, (the one that showed the RETS authentication response) that the RETS server I am connecting to does not support updating of records. This is a huge letdown in my view. Many of the real estate research applications I have built would benefit from being able to update listings.  Until I gain access to a RETS server that does support updating, I obviously won't be covering those topics.