XML Multi Parser Transformation

Plugin version: 2.11.0

The XML Multi Parser Transform uses XPath to extract fields from an XML document. It will generate records from the children of the element specified by the XPath. If there is some error parsing the document or building the record, the problematic input record will be dropped.

You might want to use this transform if your input record contains a field that is in xml format and you want to parse multiple records from that field. For example, it may contain the contents of an RSS feed, and you want to parse out the items contained in that feed.

Configuration

Property	Macro Enabled?	Description

Property	Macro Enabled?	Description
XML Field to Parse	Yes	Required. The field in the input record that contains the XML document.
XML encoding	Yes	Optional. The character set encoding of the XML document. Defaults to UTF-8.
XPath	Yes	Required. The XPath to the element(s) from which to parse out records. Output records will be generated from the children of the elements referenced by the XPath. For example: /rss/channel/item.
Disallow Doctype DTD	No	Optional. This prevents processing any DTDs while reading xml files. This defaults to `false` from the plugin but when configuring the plugin via UI this will be set to true. This is to prevent xxe based xml vulnerabilities while reading the xml file. Please read more about xxe xml vulnerability here_Processing).
Load external DTD	No	Optional. Enable loading external DTD while reading xml file. Sets http://apache.org/xml/features/load-external-dtd Default is Off.
Enable External Parameter Entities	No	Optional. Enable external parameter entities while reading xml file. Sets http://xml.org/sax/features/external-parameter-entities Default is Off.
Enable External General Entities	No	Optional. Enable external parameter entities while reading xml file. Sets http://xml.org/sax/features/external-general-entities Default is Off.
Output Schema	No	Required. The schema of records to output. Each field in the schema must be a child of the XML element referenced by the XPath. Currently only simply types are supported.

Conditions

If error dataset is configured, then all the erroneous rows, if present in the input, will be committed to the specified error dataset. If no error dataset is configured, then pipeline will get completed but with warnings in the logs.

Example

This example parses an XML record received in the “body” field of the input record. It specifies an XPath of ‘/rss/channel/item’, which means it will generate a record for each item node that matches that XPath. It generates output records with guid, title, and pubDate fields, which are taken from those child elements of each item node in the xml.

Property	Value

Property	Value
XML Field to Parse	`body`
XPath	`/rss/channel/item`

For example, for xml document:

<rss>
    <channel>
        <item>
            <guid>id123</guid>
            <title>Something Happened in the World</name>
            <pubDate>1970-01-01 12:00:00</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <guid>id456</guid>
            <title>Some Other Thing Happened in the World</name>
            <pubDate>1970-01-01 13:00:00</pubDate>
        </item>
    </channel>
</rss>

The transform will output records:

guid	title	pubDate

guid	title	pubDate
id123	Something Happened in the World	1970-01-01 12:00:00
id456	Some Other Thing Happened in the World	1970-01-01 13:00:00