HTTP, XML, and XPath
Building assemblies in the assembly editor requires some knowledge of HTTP, XML, and XPath.
For an introduction to HTTP, see here.
For an introduction to XML, see here.
For an introduction to XPath, see here.
Assembly modules that process XML provide dropdowns to select nodes and attributes based on XPaths that are automatically parsed from the module's input data streams:
You can edit these XPaths manually if needed, when the automatically parsed XPaths don't select needed nodes.
The system does not support all XPath functionality within the assembly modules, however. Only a subset of overall XPath functionality is available.
Given this sample XML:
This is the available XPath functionality that can be used within assembly modules:
myXML/person[1] | Just the first "person" node. | Homer |
|---|---|---|
myXML/person | All the "person" nodes | Homer, Marge, Montgomery |
myXML/person[2-3] | "person" nodes 2 to 3 inclusive | Marge, Montgomery |
myXML/person[2-] | "person" nodes 2 and onwards | Marge, Montgomery |
myXML/person[-2] | "person" nodes up to and including 2 | Homer, Marge |
myXML/person[@show] | All "person" nodes that have a "show" attribute | Homer, Marge, Montgomery |
myXML/person[@show = 'simpsons'] | All "person" nodes that have a "show" attribute which equals "simpsons" (compare is case-sensitive) | Homer, Marge, Montgomery |
myXML/*/firstname | All "firstname" nodes under any node in "myXML" | Homer, Marge, Montgomery |
myXML/person[1]/@show | The "show" attribute of the first "person" node | simpsons |
myXML/person[1]/lastname/text() | The text of the "lastname" node of the first "person" node | Simpson |
myXML/person/last() | The number of "person" nodes | 3 |
If you need more XPath functionality than is possible within the pre-built baseline modules, then you should use the Extension - Server-Side Script module and write Java JSP code that uses the VTD-XML parser to process the XML as needed.
