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
