XML (Extensible Markup Language)

Description

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a markup language for documents containing structured information, much like HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). However, unlike HTML, which is used to format and display data, XML is used to essentially transport and share data. The fact that XML is just plain text is the primary reason for its superiority. In the real world, computer systems and databases contain data in incompatible formats. Since XML data is stored in plain text format, it provides a software and hardware-independent way of storing data, which, in turn, makes it much easier to create data that different applications can share.

Automate's XML action enables automation of many common XML related activities, such as transforming, merging, validating and signing XML documents. They are also capable of reading, creating, editing or deleting XML nodes as well as extracting XML fragments (i.e. a collection of XML nodes) and saving them to a file or other means. The XML activities provide all of the features and functionality necessary for managing and manipulating XML.

IMPORTANT: Use of Automate's XML activities require a basic understanding of XML and related terms, such as XPath, URI, DTD and XSLT.

Available Activities

Click the appropriate link for more details regarding each activity:

Activity Description
XML - Create node Creates a new node in an existing XML file. Optionally assigns a value and attribute to the node.
XML - Create session Creates a new XML session based on an XML file or specified text. This session can be used in subsequent XML steps to modify an in-memory (saved to memory) copy of the XML data.
XML - Dataset to XML Allows an Automate dataset to be stored into XML text. The dataset must first be created in a previous step and must exist in the task in order for this action to work.
XML - Delete node Deletes all the nodes/attributes that match the Xpath expression in a given XML file.
XML - Edit node Edits a node value or its attribute in a given file.
XML - End session Ends the specified XML session.
XML - Evaluate Xpath Evaluates an XPath expression using XPath functions.
XML - Export Extracts an XML fragment (that is, a collection of nodes) located at the specified XPath and saves it to a new file.
XML - Extract node Extracts the XML node's children and their corresponding values located at the position expressed by the XPath and then creates and populates a dataset with the results.
XML - Import Merges two XML files together into one XML file.
XML - Node to dataset Retrieves the text value or XPath expression of each node in a document tree or the value of a specific attribute and populates a dataset with the results.  
XML - Read node Retrieves the XML node value (or attribute value, if specified) located at the position expressed by the XPath and places it into an Automate variable.
XML - Save Saves the in-memory representation of the XML session, for example, to a file or variable before ending the XML session. Using this action does not end the session, thus allowing subsequent XML steps to continue using the session.
XML - Sign Signs an XML file with the specified key. Signing an XML file provides a means of verification that the file has not been modified.
XML - Transform Transforms an XML file into HTML using an XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) file.
XML - Validate Validates that an XML file in session is well-formed, schema compliant or DTD (Document Type Definition ) compliant.
XML - Verify Verifies whether the signature of the specified XML file is valid.