Parsing of XML with vRealize Orchestrator

Parsing of XML is fairly straightforward with vRO, however there is one major gotcha you should be aware of; namespaces.

Depending on the XML content that vRO is trying to parse it may not return any values if certain namespaces are used. One way around this is to do a string.replace on the xml prior to parsing it.

An example of how to parse XML is shown below:

The code below is based on the following XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<CreateITDCIResponse xmlns="http://www.ibm.com/maximo" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" creationDateTime="2016-06-22T13:07:11+00:00" transLanguage="EN" baseLanguage="EN" messageID="1466600831635951728" maximoVersion="7 1 20110105-1024 V7118-37"><ITDCISet>
<CI>
<CHANGEBY>Someuser</CHANGEBY>
<CHANGEDATE>2016-06-22T13:07:11+00:00</CHANGEDATE>
<CIID>123456</CIID>
<CINAME>CINAMETEST</CINAME>
<CINUM>CITEST</CINUM>
<ITDCIMANAGEDBY>TBD</ITDCIMANAGEDBY>
<ITDCIOPERATINGENV>TBD</ITDCIOPERATINGENV>
<ITDSERVCONTPLAN>0</ITDSERVCONTPLAN>
<STATUS>VERIFY</STATUS>
<STATUSDATE>2016-06-22T13:07:11+00:00</STATUSDATE>
</CI>
</ITDCISet>
</CreateITDCIResponse>

And this is the vRO code used to extract a specific field, in this case the CIID

// Strip out the namespace definition as vRO doesn't handle the definitions very well

var modifiedXMLString = xmlString.replace('xmlns="http://www.ibm.com/maximo" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"',"");


var parsedXML = new XML(modifiedXMLString)

// Check to see whether we have any content

if (!parsedXML) {
 var errorCode = "Invalid XML Document";
 throw "Invalid XML document";
}

// Validate that only 1 CI has been returned

if (parsedXML.ITDCISet.CI.length() != 1) {
 var errorCode = "Invalid number of CIs returned";
 throw "Invalid number of CIs returned";
}

else {
 for each (CI in parsedXML.ITDCISet.CI) {
 System.log("The CI number is: " + CI.CIID);
 }
 }