Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Splitting Data Content

A somewhat common problem is splitting data from a single Element or Attribute in the source tree into two or more locations in the result tree. Let's again go back to our scenario of converting prospects to customers, but this time we'll assume that the contact management system has only a single field for the full name. (This is again somewhat of a contrived example, but I can't think of a better one right now.)

We want to turn this:

Source (CombinedContent.xml)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <CombinedContent> <FullName>Fred Public</FullName> </CombinedContent>

into this:

Result (SplitContent.xml)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <SplitContent> <FirstName>Fred</FirstName> <LastName>Public</LastName> ...