ADVANCED macromedia COLDFUSION MX 7 Application Development [Electronic resources]

Parsing XML Documents

An XML document by itself is just a string of text. To harness the power of XML, you must

parse it to create an object that ColdFusion can access much like a collection of structures and arrays.

Using XmlParse()

To parse an XML document stored somewhere on disk, use <cffile> and XmlParse(), as demonstrated in Listing 14.2.

Listing 14.2. ParseXML.cfmParsing an XML Document on Disk

<cffile action="READ"
file="#ExpandPath('CompaniesAndEmployees.xml')#"
variable="xmlDocument">
<cfset xmlObject = XmlParse(xmlDocument, "Yes")>
<cfdump var="#xmlObject#">

Figure 14.1 shows the output of xmlObject in the browser.

That was pretty painless, wasn't it? By parsing the document contents with the XmlParse() function, we converted the XML document into an object that ColdFusion recognizes as a set of employees, rather than just as a string of text.

The "Yes" is the value of the caseSensitive argument to XmlParse(), which makes the created object case-sensitive.