Question

I am making an external call to a Server and returning XML (HTTPResponse). I then use a DOM parser to get a list of items.
How can I add the list of items to a DataTable/DataList?

How can I parse the XML structure into a Salesforce structure within the class itself?

Thank you

Hi eyesscream. All is working fine, except one thing. I needed to get deep in XML

Dom.XMLNode rootElement = doc.getRootElement();
for (Dom.XmlNode assets : rootElement.getChildElements()) {
    if (assets.getName().trim() == 'models') {
        for (Dom.XmlNode asset : assets.getChildElements()) {
            if (asset.getName().trim() == 'model') {
                for (Dom.XmlNode serial : asset.getChildElements()) {
                    if (serial.getName().trim() == 'modelNumber') {
                        text = serial.getText().trim();
                        allOptons.add(new SelectOption(text, text));
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

on VF page it duplicates the results. Why?

Answer 1

Go through your XML adding elements to a list of strings of wrapper objects if you need to store more than 1 parameter. Then such list can be assigned to dataTable, pageBlockTable, repeat etc tags without any problems. It’s not like these tags work only on standard sObjects.

For a simple list of Strings with checkboxes you don’t even need any helper classes.

public class StackXml{
    public List<SelectOption> allOptions {get;private set;}    // this will hold serial numbers for use in VF page.
    // if you wouldn't plan to use VF with checkboxes, simple List<String> would be enough

    public List<String> selectedOptions {get;set;}

    public StackXml(){
        allOptions = new List<SelectOption>();
        selectedOptions = new List<String>();

        String xmlString = '<serials><serialNumber>ver123</serialNumber><serialNumber>ver456 </serialNumber>' +
            '<intrusion>something to prove it will be skipped</intrusion>' +
            '<serialNumber>abc007</serialNumber></serials>';

        Dom.Document doc = new Dom.Document();
        doc.load(xmlString);

        Dom.XMLNode rootElement = doc.getRootElement();
        for(Dom.XmlNode node : rootElement.getChildElements()){
            if(node.getName().trim() == 'serialNumber') {
                String text = node.getText().trim();
                allOptions.add(new SelectOption(text, text));
            }
        }
    }

    public void assign(){}
}

---

<apex:page controller="StackXml">
    <apex:form>
        <apex:selectCheckboxes value="{!selectedOptions}" layout="pageDirection">
            <apex:selectOptions value="{!allOptions}"/>
        </apex:selectCheckboxes>
        <apex:commandButton value="Assign" action="{!assign}"/>
    </apex:form>
    <hr/>
    <p>You have selected:</p>
    <apex:dataList value="{!selectedOptions}" var="o">{!o}</apex:dataList>
</apex:page>