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Element Tags

Article Number: 1799 | Rating: Unrated | Last Updated: Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 5:02 PM

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Element Tags

An element starts with an opening element tag, and is closed with a closing element tag. The element name must be the same in both opening and closing tags. If more than one data item is required to be included within an element, then each one must be defined by a child element nested within that element.

An opening element tag looks like <element-name>. A closing element tag looks like </element-name>.

For an output XML template generated by the Datafile XML module, the database data item name is used as the tag. You could do this too; so if the 28th data item in a database was called Example-Item, then you could create an element as follows:

<D028-Data-Item>D028-Data-Item</D028-Data-Item>

For brevity, this can be given in the template for an output XML file (as does the Datafile XML generator) as <D028-Data-Item/>, which is the null element form (see below). This will actually generate the full XML element if the data contains a non-null value. If the data item contained, say, the value 47.21, then this would be expanded in the output XML file to:

<D028-Data-Item>47.21</D028-Data-Item>

Within the template for an incoming XML file, an element with no data can be written using the short form <element-name/>. Such a null element means that any data in that element from the incoming XML file.

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