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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
KylieF
Alteryx Community Team
Alteryx Community Team
Status changed to: Revisit

Thank you for contributing to the Alteryx Community! We are really interested in your idea, however we cannot fit this idea on the near future road map. We’ll keep this idea in mind however, and will update the status once we’re better able to speak on when and if we can implement it.

GabeHCoud
5 - Atom

+1

hroderick-thr
11 - Bolide

I need this too

Thermanni
7 - Meteor

+1

SubratDas5
10 - Fireball

Can this be included in a 2021.x release please ? The amount of time people spend parsing XMLs they could do a round trip around the world in a aeroplane. Please help. sOs.

FlorianH
7 - Meteor

+1

steven4320555
8 - Asteroid

Great idea, can't wait to see it is implemented! 

 

In the meantime, I found some potentially helpful resource from the community while exploring the topic:

1. Output as XML - Alteryx Community

2. Parsing XML - Alteryx Community 

3. XML Parsing for Beginners - Alteryx Community

karlhansen
9 - Comet

There is a third-party XML reader here that seems pretty good.  It offers XPath functionality.

 

https://medium.com/@dobiasz.laszlo/i-created-an-html-xml-parser-tool-in-alteryx-using-python-sdk-d3a...

 

 

GaryMolloy
6 - Meteoroid

XML is so commonly used for data transfer it is almost unfathomable that Alteryx does not have native export capability.