Question

I am really new to XMl and have been tasked with extracting some values from an XML column.

I have read LOTS of example of how to do this on the internet and on here and have tried several different methods. Whilst I can get these to work, they only return null values so clearly something isn’t going right. The only difference I can see is that in our XML code they use SOAP. A previous developer wrote the code and so I cannot ask them.

These are the methods I have tried:

---

SELECT
  settings.value('item[1]/_value[1]', 'int') as PrinterId
      FROM dbo.usersettings 
    where userid = 2156

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 create table XMLPrinters (PrinterList xml)
   insert XMLPrinters select settings 
       from dbo.UserSettings
            where userid = 2156

select 
    r.p.value ('item[1]/_key[1]', 'nvarchar (50)') as PrinterType,
    r.p.value ('item[1]/_value[1]', 'int') as PrinterId 
from XMLPrinters 
    cross apply printerlist.nodes ('//item') r(p)

---

As I say, I am very new to XML and don’t come from a coding background so there probably is something I am missing, but the XML code doesn’t seem to fit other formats I have seen on the web, and I guess this is probably due to the SOAP.

The code itself is 2496 lines long, but this is an extract from the beginning where I am trying to extract the values from:

         <SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"                             xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
               xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" 
               xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" 
               xmlns:clr="http://schemas.microsoft.com/soap/encoding/clr/1.0" 
               SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<SOAP-ENC:Array SOAP-ENC:arrayType="xsd:anyType[5]">
  <item xmlns:a2="http://schemas.microsoft.com/clr/ns/System.Collections"                     xsi:type="a2:DictionaryEntry">
    <_key xsi:type="xsd:string">primaryprinter</_key>
    <_value xsi:type="xsd:anyType" xsi:null="1" />
  </item>

  <item xmlns:a2="http://schemas.microsoft.com/clr/ns/System.Collections" xsi:type="a2:DictionaryEntry">
    <_key xsi:type="xsd:string">secondaryprinter</_key>
    <_value xsi:type="xsd:anyType" xsi:null="1" />
  </item>

  <item xmlns:a2="http://schemas.microsoft.com/clr/ns/System.Collections" si:type="a2:DictionaryEntry">
    <_key xsi:type="xsd:string">i18mminstancelabel</_key>
    <_value xsi:type="xsd:string">1056</_value>
  </item>

Eventually what I need to do is to extract the _value where _key = PrimaryPrinter and do this for each user.

Any help or ideas anyone has would be greatly received!

Regards

Julie

Answer 1

Don’t actually understand what your first query does. But the second will work if you remove item[1]/ from the xpath where you fetch the values.

select 
    r.p.value ('_key[1]', 'nvarchar (50)') as PrinterType,
    r.p.value ('_value[1]', 'int') as PrinterId 
from XMLPrinters 
    cross apply printerlist.nodes ('//item') r(p)

Result with the XML you provided:

PrinterType                                        PrinterId
-------------------------------------------------- -----------
primaryprinter                                     0
secondaryprinter                                   0
i18mminstancelabel                                 1056