XML import Question

rubyonrails-talk
1

hi guys can somebody help to find some tutorial or link to find the way to import an external XML file to rails with some nodes and child-nodes.

Thanks

2

Try using Nokogiri: http://nokogiri.org/ It's a great and easy to use parser.

3

What are you after? The answer really depends on your situation.

Two options come to mind:

A custom rake task. You can see a simple example here that uses YAML instead of XML as source data:

http://github.com/kete/kete/blob/master/lib/tasks/user_export_import.rake

Here's an example of parsing from source XML (modify this and replace the YAML parsing the above rake task):

http://github.com/kete/kete/blob/master/lib/workers/excel_based_importer_worker.rb - starting around line 30, note the hardcoding of element names that you need to adjust

Another option, if you have already created a RESTful interface that accepts XML for creating new records, you might simply create a script that parses your existing XML file and submits a POST to your create action with the relevant data. Not necessarily the fastest process, but if it is a one off import it might be the quickest thing to put together programming wise. Net::HTTP and Nokogiri seem like all you really need.

I would probably just go with the rake task. Pretty simple.

Cheers, Walter

4

Thanks a lot for your help i'll try with thats options have you guys ever used the "Hash.from_xml " method to import XML

thanks for the help i really really appreciate

5

I've used it in the past. If you aren't importing a huge amount of records it might be ok. Otherwise I think you are better off using Nokogiri. Depends on the complexity of your source XML.

Cheers, Walter