Salesforce consuming XML and display data in Visualforce report

Posted by JavaKungFu on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by JavaKungFu
Published on 2010-11-05T14:43:57Z Indexed on 2010/12/29 23:54 UTC
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Firstly, this question requires a bit of introduction so please bear with me.

The high level is that I am connecting to a outside web service which will return some XML to my apex controller. The idea is that I want to display the XML returned into a nice tabular format in a VisualForce page. The format of the XML coming back will look something like this:

<Wrapper><reportTable name='table_id' title='Report Title'>
  <row>
    <Element1><![CDATA[campaign_id]]></Element1>
    <Element2><![CDATA[577373]]></Element2>
    <Element3><![CDATA[4129]]></Element3>
    <Element4 dataFormat='2' dataSuffix='%'><![CDATA[0.7151]]></Element4>
    <Element5><![CDATA[2010-04-04]]></Element5>
    <Element6><![CDATA[2010-05-03]]></Element6>
  </row>
</reportTable>

...

Now currently I am using the XMLdom utility class (developed by SF for XML functions) to map this data into a custom object "reportTable" which contains a list of "row" custom objects. The reason I am building it out this way is because I don't know how many elements will be in each row, nor the number of rows.

The Visualforce page looks something like this:

<table><apex:repeat value="{!reportTables}" var="table">
  <apex:repeat value="{!table.rows}" var="row">
  <tr>
   <apex:repeat value="{!row.ColumnValue}" var="column">
    <apex:repeat value="{!column}" var="value">
     <td>
     <apex:outputText value="{!value}" />
     </td>
    </apex:repeat>
   </apex:repeat>
   </tr>
  </apex:repeat>

Questions are:

1) Does this seem like a good approach to the problem?

2) Is there a simpler/better way to consume the XML besides writing my own custom objects to map VF to?

Open to any and all suggestions. I really hope there is a better way than building the HTML table myself, as then I also have to deal with styling and alignment etc. Thanks.

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