Read From XML - 23.1

The Read from XML stage reads an XML file into a job or subflow. It defines the file's path and data format, including XML schema and data element details.

Simple XML elements are converted to flat fields and passed on to the next stage. Simple XML data consists of records made up of XML elements that contain only data and no child elements. For example, this is a simple XML data file:

<customers>
    <customer>
        <name>Sam</name>
        <gender>M</gender>
        <age>43</age>
        <country>United States</country>
    </customer>
    <customer>
        <name>Jeff</name>
        <gender>M</gender>
        <age>32</age>
        <country>Canada</country>
    </customer>
    <customer>
        <name>Mary</name>
        <gender>F</gender>
        <age>61</age>
        <country>Australia</country>
    </customer>
</customers>

Notice that in this example each record contains simple XML elements such as <name>, <gender>, <age>, and <country>. None of the elements contain child elements.

The Read from XML stage automatically flattens simple data like this because most stages require data to be in a flat format. If you want to preserve the hierarchical structure, use an Aggregator stage after Read from XML to convert the data to hierarchical data.

Complex XML elements remain in hierarchical format and are passed on as a list field. Since many stages require data to be in a flat format, so you may have to flatten complex XML to make the data usable by downstream stages. See Flattening Complex XML Elements for more information.

Read from XML Options