XML Fluid Value

FormatClass Library

LanguageC#

RepoGitHub Gist

What It Is

A Fluid value to query an XML document in a template

Status

Last Reviewed:

Written as a POC. Never did anything with it.

Details

This Fluid value allows you to push raw XML into Fluid template, extract values from it, and iterate elements in it.

Consider this XML:

<people>
    <person>
        <name prefix="Mr">
            <first>Deane</first>
            <last>Barker</last>
        </name>
    </person>
    <person>
        <name prefix="Mrs">
            <first>Annie</first>
            <last>Barker</last>
        </name>
    </person>
</people>

var xml = GetTheXml();
templateContext.SetValue("people", new XmlValue(xml));

Liquid

{% for person in people._children %}
* {{ person.name._attrs.prefix }} {{ person.name.first._text }} {{ person.name.last._text }}
{% endfor %}

Everything available is documented above:

An XmlValue represents a complete fragment of XML, with a single root node (people at the start of the document, and person inside the loop iteration)
A normal accessor will descend into the XML structure element by element. So person.name.last drills down through the elements with those names (from whatever the root is). Each time, it’s returning another XmlValue.
_text will return the text of the element as a StringValue
_attrs will return a DictionaryValue of the attributes of the element, so the next member will effectively access that key of the dictionary, or that attribute name
_children will return an ArrayValue of XmlValues representing the children of the node

There is no functionality for descendents or ancestors or anything else, just children. However, with the functions capability of Fluid which was released after I wrote that, it would be fairly easy inject some type of XPath support.

This code is a good reference example for using GetValue to create virtual members.