How to access a specific element and attribute in xml with vba in excel?

Question

I\'m struggling with getting excel to parse through an xml file. I\'ve found a plethora of examples, but none seem to be quite what I am looking for and I can\'t seem to get pas

Answer 1

I think that the final code presented in the question may not always traverse the whole xml document as the xmlChildren variable is overridden during the loop so I think this may just get the first child node and it's first child and so on.

To traverse the whole document you can call a separate procedure and build in a recursive call so that it will follow each of the child nodes but then return back to the list it was called from when done.

Here is a simplified example where I am looking for all instances of a specific xml element, say all carts in an xml doc containing:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ImportConfig>
    <ShoppingCarts description="Any carts added here will be picked up by the auto import">
        <cart>shopping cart 1 name here</cart>
        <cart>shopping cart 2 name here</cart>
    </ShoppingCarts>
</ImportConfig>

The first procedure below is specific for this example i.e. where the tags are named etc, but the other two can be used generically for any xml document (the first is just an example of how they can be used):

' Chris Prosser 09/07/2014
' example use of getElementList (in this case to get all cart elements)

Sub getCarts()
    Dim carts As Collection
    Dim i As Integer

    Set carts = New Collection
    getElementList "C:\Users\Chris\Dropbox\VBAutomation\AutoImportConfig.xml", "cart", carts

    For i = 1 To carts.count
        Debug.Print carts.Item(i)
    Next

End Sub

' Chris Prosser 09/07/2014
' Gets the values of all instances of a specific element from an xml file

Sub getElementList(xml_file_path As String, _
                          elementName As String, _
                          elementValuesList As Collection)

    Dim xmlDoc As MSXML2.DOMDocument
    Dim xmlRoot As MSXML2.IXMLDOMNode
    Dim xmlChildren As MSXML2.IXMLDOMNodeList
    Dim xmlElement As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement

    Set xmlDoc = New MSXML2.DOMDocument
    xmlDoc.async = False
    xmlDoc.validateOnParse = False
    xmlDoc.Load (xml_file_path)
    Set xmlRoot = xmlDoc.documentElement
    Set xmlChildren = xmlRoot.childNodes

    iterateOverChildNodes xmlChildren, elementName, elementValuesList

End Sub

' Chris Prosser 09/07/2014
' Call with a list of xmlNodes (can be generated from a file using getElementList)
' and an element name to search for. The procedure find child nodes and re-runs
' recursively until all branchs from the list of nodes passed in have been traversed

Sub iterateOverChildNodes(xmlChildren As MSXML2.IXMLDOMNodeList, _
                          elementName As String, _
                          elementValuesList As Collection)

    Dim xmlElement As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement
    Dim xmlGrandChildren As MSXML2.IXMLDOMNodeList

    For Each xmlElement In xmlChildren
        If xmlElement.nodeName = elementName Then
            'Debug.Print xmlElement.nodeTypedValue
            elementValuesList.Add xmlElement.nodeTypedValue
        Else
            Set xmlGrandChildren = xmlElement.childNodes
            iterateOverChildNodes xmlGrandChildren, elementName, elementValuesList
        End If
    Next xmlElement

End Sub