Question

So I’m trying to convert a web service that was an Oracle application to T-SQL. The fun part is I only have the web service code and no database code at all. I see there is an input parameter that contains <ROWSET><ROW NUM=\"1\"><TRANSACTIONID>123456</TRANSACTIONID></ROW></ROWSET>

I’m looking through the docs for T-SQL and I can’t seem to find anything helpful on what I can do with this xml. From what I can understand it’s used to insert values into a table since the elements will not be similar in every call.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Assuming this XML is a parameter to your T-SQL stored proc or function, you can use the OPENXML utility to work with this type of data. Here‘s a complete example (reposted here for clarity):

DECLARE @idoc int
DECLARE @doc varchar(1000)
SET @doc ='
<people>
  <person id="1">
    <firstname>John</firstname>
    <surname>Doe</surname>
  </person>
  <person id="2">
    <firstname>Mary</firstname>
    <surname>Jane</surname>
  </person>
</people>
'
/* Create an internal representation of the XML document */
EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @idoc OUTPUT, @doc
-- Execute a SELECT statement that uses the OPENXML rowset provider.
SELECT    *
FROM       OPENXML (@idoc, '/people/person',1)
            WITH (id varchar(20),
                  firstname varchar(20) 'firstname',
                  surname varchar(20) 'surname')
EXECUTE sp_xml_removedocument @idoc

Result:

id  firstname       surname
1   John            Doe
2   Mary            Jane