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padmanabant852500
April 3, 2025
Question

Leveraging the XPATH parsing and XML handling in Appian

  • April 3, 2025
  • 9 replies
  • 0 views

Team, want to check on these 2 aspects, which we are attempting to leverage in our Appian solution implementation.

 

1) We are building a solution to retrieve specific data using XPATH from an XML and mapping it to a target location.

                We will be using the "xpathdocument" function in Appian to fetch the value from XML.

 

2) We will also be leveraging the below function to obtain our XML.

  1. i) Convert the json data we have into an Appian object
  2. ii) Then convert the Appian object into XML.

 

--- something like this ---

  local!apoPbj: a!fromJson(ri!ipJson)

  local!xmlObj: toxml(local!apoPbj, true, "xml")

--- something like this ---

 

3) Data will be fetched from XML using the 'xpathdocument' method as we mentioned above.

 

This looks working good when tested.

Question:

1) But I see currently "xpathdocument" method supports only XPATH 1.0. Does Appian have plan to support the newest XPATH version down the line?

2) Do you see any limitations in the above strategy?

9 replies

stefanhelzle0001
stefanhelzle0001
April 4, 2025

1) Who knows ... I am sure this is somewhere on the list of improvements we are all waiting for. If you can turn this into a valuable business case, then contact Appian for a product improvement.

2) Why not just stay with JSON? Adding XML to the game does not make sense from my perspective, not knowing the details of your use case.

P
padmanabant852500Author
April 4, 2025

Thanks for answering the first question.

I personally had some past experiences that XPATH 2 or 3 -  had little more ability and readability to fetch and parse values from a XML rather  what JSONPATH could do with JSON. Could be a personal perspective too. But with JSON path evolving, it too can overcome XPATH sooner.

So we went with XPATH in case we will get a chance to leverage the latest version of XPATH parsers available in case from Appian.

Let me see how we can raise a Product improvement request on this. We may not keep using the XPATH strategy as a policy decision in future implementations. But I thought it would be powerful had Appian supported the latest XPATH parsing versions.

Its great to interact with you. Appreciate your insights.

stefanhelzle0001
stefanhelzle0001
April 4, 2025

Help me understand your use case. If it is just about mapping data from incoming data to use somewhere in Appian, you will not need any sophisticated XML parsing. And if the incoming data is JSON, stay with JSON. Use fromJson() to parse it into a dictionary and you can easily work with it using normal Appian code.

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