Thank you for joining me for this video XML Reader plugin. For Servoy University, I'm Bob Cusick. The XML Reader plugin can come in really handy whether you have XML files to read from disk or whether it's stored in your database or whether you're getting it back from a web service. Here for this example, I have a simple XML file that's a catalog of CDs. At the outmost node is the catalog node. And then there are multiple CD nodes within that. Then each CD node has a title, an artist, a country, a company, a price and a year. Now what I've done is I've created a very simple database that mimics this structure. It has title, artist, country, company, price. And I had to name the field year pub because year is a reserve word and sequel so I couldn't create a column with the name year. I've also created a script attached to this button parsecsML and it will actually prompt me for this file on disk. It will parsec and create the new records and put the data in the correct fields. So let's see how it works. Choose the file, click select, and it's created 26 rows. Just a double check if we go to the first row. We see it's Empire barlesque by Bob Dylan, the country is USA, companies Columbia, prices 1090 and the year is 1985. And we'll go to the next record. Which should be, Hijr Hart by Bonnie Tyler, UK, CVS, 990 and the year's 1988. And so you can see that it correctly brought in all of the records from this XML file. It parsec the XML and created the corresponding database rows. Let's have a look at the code behind the button and see what's going on. So here's the code for our parsecsML button. The very first thing we do is we use the file plugin to allow the user to choose a file from disk. And we filtered it by text or XML. Those are the only two valid file types that the user can choose. If they didn't press cancel, then we actually use the XML reader as only got two main functions, read from file or read from string. In this case, we're going to go ahead and pass up the file object that we received from the file plugin and have it read the document from disk. You can use read XML document from string if you have the XML stored in your database or if you use a web service and get XML back as a result of the call to your web service. So we store the overall document in a very well called XML node. Because once we read the document from either a file or a string, we get this XML node object back. In this XML node object has a number of helper functions. One of them is get child nodes. If we come back to our XML document for just a moment, we can see that catalog is the outmost node. So when we say get the child nodes, we're going to get all of the individual CD records. So that's what we're calling here total nodes. This XML node zero, which is the very first one, our catalog object, get the child nodes. Then we're going to loop through each one of those individual CD nodes and we're going to get all of the other child nodes within that. That will give us all of our field values. So as we loop through each one of those children, we have CD field name is then we use the plugin function get name and it gets the name of the XML node element. We convert it to lower case. That way we know what to compare it to and all of our fields are also in lower case and we're going to eventually want to specify the field and set the value. Next we use the get text value function of the node to get the actual value that's inside the brackets. Let's go back to our XML. So for example, the first field name is called title and the value is empire burlesque. So that's what's in between the title tag and the closing title tag. And that's what get text value is all about. So once we have our field and our value, there are a couple of special cases that we need to consider. If the field name is title, we know that title is the very first entry for each CD. So we need to create a new record and in this case, we're going to create the record at the end of the stack. If the field name is year, we know that our corresponding name of the column in our database is year underscore pub. So we're going to change that CD field name to year pub. And finally, if the field name is price, we want to coerce the text value into a numeric value. So we're going to times it by one. And then finally, in line 37, we just tell the form CD catalog, whatever stored in the field name equals whatever the value is. So we'll go ahead and write that value out for all of the fields because we have the name the same as our XML file. There's a couple of other functions that I wanted to point out to you, the get attribute names and get attribute values. Now in our XML, we don't have any attributes. Attributes would be something like this. If you had artists and then you had something like gender equals male, that would be an attribute of this node. And that's where you can use get attribute names and get attribute values. As you can see, the XML reader will save you a ton of time when you're trying to parse XML files, whether you're parsing them from files on disk or you get them back as a result of your web service. I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial. Thanks for watching.