Salesforce consuming XML and display data in Visualforce report
- by JavaKungFu
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.
