Reading locally stored XML files in Python (Jupyter) with Alteryx

AgrimNautiyal

Hi Everyone! This being my first community post, very excited to learn from all your experiences 🙂

I wrote a python script to iteratively parse an XML File to an excel table (csv) for further Alteryx analysis. I want to modify my use case to incorporate this parsing logic within a single canvas itself (instead of first running my python script separately and then plugging the resulting csv into my canvas).

I was hoping to achieve this by using the Python tool, but as I understand the tool reads all inputs as a pandas dataframe by default and this causes incompatibility with my parsing script as I make use of the "xml" python library that directly deals with an input XML file.

I was wondering if there was any way in which I can directly read the XML file stored locally, in my Jupyter notebook within Alteryx and replicate my script. 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and do let me know in case any further details are required, thank you!

danilang

hi @AgrimNautiyal 

The input on the Python tool is optional, so you can use it as the first tool in a stream of tools.  At the end of your script, change it so that instead of writing to a csv, convert the table to a data frame and send it to the Python tool output using Alteryx.write(df,1).  This will make it available for further processing in the workflow.

For a bit of added flexibility, you could use a text input to pass in the name of the file to the Python tool.

Dan