Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!
The Product Idea boards have gotten an update to better integrate them within our Product team's idea cycle! However this update does have a few unique behaviors, if you have any questions about them check out our FAQ.

Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!
Submitting an Idea?

Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!

Submission Guidelines

Native treatment of XML

Given the prevalence of XML - it seems that it's worth adding a native XML capability to Alterxy (similar to the discussion with @CharleyMcGee and  @KaneG in the discussion forum).    Currently XML is treated mostly like a big and oddly behaved text field, which really undermines the usefulness of XML in real applications.

 

What I'm thinking is:

- Add in a component, which acts like a join, but what it does is validates an XML file vs. an XSD file so that you can see if your XML file matches the schema definition.   Tremendously useful if you've ever had to hand-craft XML.

- Add in a native data-type for XML (like you have a data-type for Centroids)

- On this XML data type - you can then do interesting things like walk the document object model, or iterate through all children (which fixes the issue of deeply nested XML being such a pain).     This would bring XML parsing into the level of usefulness that programmers in Java & Visual Studio have enjoyed for years

- Finally - an ability to construct XML data files without having to text-hack this.   i.e. something similar to the transpose tool, where for a given node, you can add children etc.

 

These four things would really really assist with getting Alteryx to be able to deal with modern data sets like JSON; XML and even web-page scrubbing.

 

As always - very happy to commit time to helping shape this - please feel free to reach out if that would be useful.

 

Thank you all

Sean

CC: @JoeM@mceleavey@MarqueeCrew@NeilR@Ned@dawid_nawrot@TaraM@GeneR

19 Comments
mceleavey
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

Nice. I would also like to add the .PMML functionality to this.

I recently had a request from a client to be able to load in .PMML files from SAS. This is a common predictive model file format, which actually produces a file which is essentially .XML, but loading it in simply treats it as text.

This might be a step in a different direction, but worth mentioning I think.

 

JohnMaty
9 - Comet

I am in full agreement.  Having this feature would be of tremendous value for me.  We consume thousands of XML messages a day and in turn need to start generate a fair amount of our own.

 

GavinAttard
11 - Bolide

Aye, support.

SubratDas5
10 - Fireball

Support on this Idea from my side, will be really really handy if there is a tool/option for XML output.

 

 

ZoeyL1GL
8 - Asteroid

 Hi everyone,

 

It is great to see this post. It is Oct 2018, wondering if there are any further developments on this topic?

 

Many thanks,

Zoey

mdkhusru
5 - Atom

I also support this idea. There is definitely a need for a component to to generate XML data based on XSD from input source. The component could also have options to either use XSD or allow the user to set up hierarchy definitions.

 

Thanks,

Ali

simonaubert_bd
13 - Pulsar

I was looking the best way to output an xml. But if there are turnaroud, I think it deserves a native capacity.

fahmed18
5 - Atom

@TaraM This idea was submitted over 2 years ago, it seems really strange that it hasn't been reviewed or an alternative solution hasn't been provided considering how many people would find this functionality extremely useful.

davidoc
7 - Meteor
Outputting data in XML format would be a great addition. Are there any plans to implement?
aglina
5 - Atom

This would be great for visualization outputs that require XML file for input.  The requirements above are spot on!