I feel kind of stuck with the absence of a proper xml library for Elixir. Currently I use SweetXML which was ok for me more or less to parse the xml content that I receive. But it doen’t feel natural to use.
Now I have to generate xml content as well. I have use cases like cutting nodes (with xpath) from one document, enriching that part with other data and generating a new document. I don’t feel like I can do that easily with SweetXML or floki (that I really like).
I put something together that almost covers what I need, have to continue on it. Maybe someone is interested in the project as well:
I don’t know where the data you need to add comes from, but if it too is XML maybe you could use XSLT’s document() function? (As it happens I was doing this the other day, but from bash, not Elixir.)
We have a couple of datasource (SOAP/XML, FTP/XML). We transform this data to json that we use internally. Normally we transform one XML to one JSON document. But there are exceptions where we need to combine different XMLs to reuse our existing mappings. I am not keen to use XML but i have to.
This library can really use some more documentation.
Example: if I want to find certain elements via an XPath expression and then modify their contents and store the result as a new XML, how would I do that with Elixml?
I agree. The documentation is very basic and only showing some use cases with examples.
For your specific question:
You could parse the XML and manipulate the maps/array structure and store it as XML again. Not very convenient. Or we could think about having a map that works like the find and change nodes.
Why not open an issue with your feature request in the Github project and I will take care. Or you can contribute to the project if you like.
They are quite cryptic and manual and verbose.
