You have a report that is using an XML file as the data source.

an XML file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<library>
    <book category="COOKING">
        <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author name="Giada De Laurentiis" country="it"/>
        <year>2005</year>
        <info>asdfghjkl</info>
    </book>    
    <book category="CHILDREN">
        <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
        <author name="J K. Rowling" country="uk" />
        <year>2005</year>
        <info>asdfghjkl</info>
    </book>    
    <book category="WEB">
        <title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title>

        <author name="James McGovern" country="us" />
        <author name="Per Bothner" country="us" />
        <info>asdfghjkl</info>
    </book>    
    <book category="WEB">
        <title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
        <author name="Erik T. Ray" country="us" />
        <year>2003</year>
        <info>asdfghjkl</info>
    </book>
</library>

1). You can use a Scripted Data Source and use java to parse the XML.

In Data Set under open:

importPackage(javax.xml.parsers);
importPackage(javax.xml.xpath);
importPackage(org.w3c.dom);
importPackage(org.xml.sax);

var factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
var builder = null;
 doc = null;
var expr = null;

factory.setNamespaceAware(true);

builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
doc = builder.parse(params["FileName"].value);
doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();

// create an XPathFactory
var xFactory = XPathFactory.newInstance();

// create an XPath object
 xpath = xFactory.newXPath();

// compile the XPath expression
expr = xpath.compile("/library/*");
// run the query and get a nodeset
var result = expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);

//initialize object variables to be used in the fetch method
nodes = result;

x = 0;
y = 0;

cnt = nodes.getLength();

Under fetch:

var lboolAllowed = false;

if (x < cnt)
{

   var book =  nodes.item(x);
   var nodeList = book.getChildNodes();
   var nodeListLength = nodeList.getLength();
   row["category"] = book.getAttribute("category");
   for(int i=0; i<nodeListLength; i++)
   {
       var child = nodeList.item(i);
       var nodeName = child.getNodeName();
       var nodeText = child.getTextContent();
       if(nodeName == "year")
       {
           row["year"] = nodeText);
       }
       else if(nodeName == "info")
       {
           row["info"] = nodeText);
       }
       else if(nodeName == "title")
       {
           row["title"] = nodeText);
       }
       else if(nodeName == "author")
       {
           row["author"] =  child.getAttribute("name");
           row["country"] = child.getAttribute("country");
       }

        y++
    }   
    x++;
    y=0;
    return (true);

    }
return (false);

Note: author is actually a list

2). You can use esProc as Data Source and use SPL to parse the XML.

Here is the SPL script.

A4:

A5:

The report can be designed in the same way as you would if you were retrieving the data from a database. For detail SPL integration with BIRT, see How to Call an SPL Script in BIRT.

For more examples, procedure XML files refer to the following XML data parsing and calculation .

If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.