I am trying to Select nodes from some webservice response XML to no avail. For some reason I am able to select the root node (\"xmldata\") however, when I try to drill deeper(\"
Short answer
oXMLHttp.ResponseXML.text may return some text, but not 'A string containing a URL that specifies the location of the XML file' as required for the parameter of .load. So replace
xmlDoc.load (oXMLHttp.ResponseXML.text)
with
xmlDoc.loadXml oXMLHttp.ResponseXML.xml
If that 'does not work', say so; I then will try to provide a longer answer.
(P.S. to the short answer: AnthonyWJones' advice not to transform the XML twice is sound; I offered this 'minimal impact on existing code' approach in the hope to get the OT over the first hurdle, not as a generally applicable strategy.)
Longer answer
If you have XML problems on an ASP page, you should try to isolate and test the XML specific problems in a console script. For your problem I filled a skeleton (load .xml file, check for errors) with code to access nodes via XPath and DOM tree:
Dim oFS : Set oFS = CreateObject( "Scripting.FileSystemObject" )
Dim sFSpec : sFSpec = oFS.GetAbsolutePathName("..\data\00.xml")
Dim oXml : Set oXml = CreateObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument")
oXml.setProperty "SelectionLanguage", "XPath"
oXml.async = False
oXml.load sFSpec
If 0 = oXml.parseError.errorCode Then
WScript.Echo "loaded:", sFSpec
WScript.Echo "root:", oXml.documentElement.tagName
Dim sXPath, ndlFnd, ndChild, ndFnd
sXPath = "/xmldata/customers"
Set ndlFnd = oXml.selectNodes(sXPath)
If 0 = ndlFnd.length Then
WScript.Echo "no '" & sXPath & "' found"
Else
WScript.Echo "found", ndlFnd.length, "node(s) for '" & sXPath & "'"
sXPath = "firstname"
For Each ndChild In ndlFnd
WScript.Echo "child:", ndChild.tagName
Set ndFnd = ndChild.selectSingleNode(sXPath)
If ndFnd Is Nothing Then
WScript.Echo "no '" & sXPath & "' found"
Else
WScript.Echo ndFnd.text, "==", ndChild.childNodes(1).text
End If
Next
End If
Else
WScript.Echo "errorCode:", oXml.parseError.errorCode
WScript.Echo oXml.parseError.reason
End If
output:
loaded: E:\trials\SoTrials\answers\11166940\data\00.xml
root: xmldata
found 1 node(s) for '/xmldata/customers'
child: customers
Jim == Jim
As you can see
First off stop doing this:
Dim doc : Set xmlDoc = CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument")
xmlDoc.LoadXML (oXmlHttp.responseXML.xml)
XML in the response is parsed into a DOM, which you then ask to be converted back into a string (.xml) which then parse (again) into another DOM (.LoadXML).
Do simply this:
Dim xmlDoc : Set xmlDoc = oXmlHttp.responseXML
Secondly you are correct in your answer XPath is case-sensitive so your XPaths (apart from the .text goof which Ekkehard has already pointed out) wouldn't work because the xml you are getting didn't match what you thought you were getting.
Finally the definition of "Camel casing" is does vary but generally this "postalAddress" is camel cased and this "PostalAddress" is refered to as "Pascal casing".
Ok, so I finally worked out what I was doing wrong. As the xml I was retrieving was from a webservice, and I had limited information about it, I used the following to write the xml to the page so that I could see how it was structured.
Response.Write oXMLHttp.ResponseXml.xml
For some reason(maybe someone could fill this part in) it wrote all the XML tags in lower case. It turns out that after some investigation and after doing the following I found out that this was not the truth!
dim nodeList
Set nodeList = xmlDoc.SelectNodes("//xmldata/")
for each item In nodeList
response.write(item.text & " -> Tag Name: " & item.nodeName & "<br />")
Next
'this wrote the following to the page
'22506 -> Tag Name: CustomerID
'Jim -> Tag Name: FirstName
'N -> Tag Name: IsSuperAdmin
'Jones 2 -> Tag Name: LastName
As you can see the 'nodeName' property output shows the tags to be camel case. So that ResponseXML was rather misleading and seeing XPath is case sensitive was preventing me from selecting the Nodes in question.