handling xml in vbscript, new element causing problems

Question

I'm guessing this is pretty straightforward but I'm not well versed in handling xml data.

I have some vbscript code that processes xml data from a third party in this format.

<data>
    <thing1>some thing</thing1>
    <thing2>some other thing</thing2>
    <parameter>
        <parameterName>customThing1</paramterName>
        <parameterValue>this is the data i want</parameterValue>
    </parameter>
</data>

Previously, all data came in like thing1 or thing2. Now we have had to add a custom field to the data, and the third party is sending it in this 'parameter' format.

I get the old data like so: (objXmlRequest is an MSXML2.DomDocument object)

thing1 = objXmlRequest.documentElement.selectSingleNode("thing1").firstChild.nodeValue

Now I need to get the value for customThing1, but I don't want to just pull 'parameterValue' because if we add another custom field in the future that will be a problem. So I need to make sure I'm getting paramterValue where parameterName = customThing1. How would I do that?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:22

Based on this: Find a parameter with a customThing1 parameterName and access its parameterValue:

Dim objMSXML : Set objMSXML = CreateObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument")
objMSXML.setProperty "SelectionLanguage", "XPath"
objMSXML.async = False
objMSXML.load ".\38512955.xml"

If 0 = objMSXML.parseError Then
   Dim sXPath : sXPath  = "/data/parameter[parameterName=""customThing1""]/parameterValue"
   Dim ndX    : Set ndX = objMSXML.selectSingleNode(sXPath)
   If ndX Is Nothing Then
      WScript.Echo sXPath, "failed"
   Else
      WScript.Echo ndX.tagName, ndX.text
   End If
Else
   WScript.Echo objMSXML.parseError.reason
End If

output:

cscript 38512955.vbs
parameterValue this is the data i want

handling xml in vbscript, new element causing problems

1 Answers1