Posts Tagged ‘XML’

Goal: Change the connection string of my application while running CodedUI tests. So my dev database is left alone.

Here I’ll post a simple “Hello World” setup to alter a xml to output something else. The xml and xslt example has been taken from w3schools.

When you download this file. It will contain a cmd. It loads up environment variables for msbuild and executes the build.proj.

The build.proj looks like this :

<Project DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">

<!-- Xml & Xslt Examples have been taken from http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/ -->

<Target Name="Build">
<XslTransformation XslInputPath="transform.xslt" XmlInputPaths="source.xml" OutputPaths="out.html" />
</Target>

</Project>

The output is a html page, just as the w3schools demo.

Hope this is a good starting example for your needs.

msbuild xslt demo

1 file(s) 2.21 KB

Download

I am somewhat bias towards C#, but one can admire the xml literals in vb.net.

This is a language feature where you can just add xml to

Dim someXml As XElement = <foo>bla<bar active=”false”/></foo>

But how do you add characters that have some a meaning in xml, like “&” or “<“. Turns out you have two options:

Look up how you should escape it (& => &amp; ) but the editor (vs2013) will show wavy underlines underneath the literal. It will compile do and work as expected.

Embed a literal string

Dim someXml As XElement = <foo>Ampersand <%= “&” %><bar active=”false”/></foo>

this uses a method to embed expressions in xml literals.

Cheet sheet XML Features SQL Server

Pre-requirement: Knowledge of XPath

All the samples are based on this XML:

<MyBooks>
	<ListOwner>John Smith</ListOwner>
	<Book>
		<title published="1885">The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</title>
		<author realName="Samuel Langhorne Clemens">Mark Twain</author>
	</Book>
	<Book>
		<title published="1894">Tom Sawyer Abroad</title>
		<author realName="Samuel Langhorne Clemens">Mark Twain</author>
	</Book>
</MyBooks>

Extract Values
select @xml.value(‘( /MyBooks/ListOwner )[1]’, ‘varchar(20)’);

Possible error:

Check if exists

select @xml.exist(‘ //Book[author/@realName=”Samuel Langhorne Clemens”] ‘)
select @xml.exist(‘ //Book[contains((author/@realName)[1],”Langhorne”)] ‘)

Extract Node

SELECT @xml.query(‘/MyBooks/Book’) –Results all book nodes.SELECT @xml.query(‘/MyBooks/Book[title=”The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”]’)SELECT @xml.query(‘/MyBooks/Book[title/@published<1890]’)

Select nodes

This will allow you to run SQL queries on XML.

select t.c.value(‘(title)[1]’,’varchar(20)’) from @xml.nodes(‘ //Book ‘) as t(c)

Modify Xml

Namespaces:

When there are namespaces in you XML you will have to do additional work.