Table of contents

• The basics and the structure
• XML Schema
• Reading data from a XML document in Power Automate
• Reading simple XML documents
• Reading list type XML documents
• Transforming a XML list into an JSON array
• Further examples
• Summing up an array of numbers
• Changelog

The basics and the structure

Just like JSON, XML describes information or represents data. More on XML here: https://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp Power Automate supports all XMLs in Version 1.

Official links:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/expression-functions-reference#xpath
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/expression-functions-reference#xml

XML Schema

Overall XML follows this syntax:

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<root>
  <child>
    <subchild>.....</subchild>
  </child>
</root>

To write a valid XML schema, you need to follow some rules:

1. The XML can start with a prolog, but this is optional

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

2. Just like JSON the names of the roots or childs can vary on your use case. In the example on the right, the root element is bookstore and the next child is book. In one XML document you might even find multiple different structures for different data.
3. Every XML document must have a root element (bookstore)
4. XML elements must have a closing tag (message and /message)

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<message>This is correct</message>

5. XML tags are case sensitive
6. XML attribute values must be quoted (e.g. book category=”web”)

Example XML

Reading data from a XML document in Power Automate

Reading simple XML documents

I would describe a simple XML document as a single entity information or anything that is not a list. The EmployeeProfile is the returned data from an API

Reading the Employee Id value: EMP-1001

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string() lets us read the value of the element that we have built the path for.

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xpath(xml(outputs('Compose_-_XML_simple')), 'string(/EmployeeProfile/EmployeeId)')

Reading the Department value: IT

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xpath(xml(outputs('Compose_-_XML_simple')), 'string(/EmployeeProfile/Department)')

Reading the currency attribute value of the salary

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@ in front of the attributes name is needed to get the value of an attribute.

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xpath(xml(outputs('Compose_-_XML_simple')), 'string(/EmployeeProfile/Salary/@currency)')

In my example the XML document is stored in an compose action called “Compose - xml simple”.

Example XML

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Reading list type XML documents

List type XML documents can be the equivalent of JSON arrays - they are a list of information. In my example the XML document is stored in an compose action called “Compose - xml advanced”.

Transforming a XML list into an JSON array

Yes, you can transform a XML list into a cleaner JSON array by using the select action. It requires you to manually map out each element and its value. You can have AI do it with all elements when you give it one example.

From: xpath(
		xml(outputs('Compose_-_xml_advanced')),
    '/Employees/EmployeeProfile'
)
Map Left: EmployeeId
Map Right: xpath(item(),'string(/EmployeeProfile/EmployeeId)')

In Power Automate it looks like this:

The raw outputs of the select action show this result:

Lets add the salary and currency to our select action. We always want to apply the correct data type for our information. This mean that the salary should be an integer value in our array.

For the salary you can either wrap the xpath() expression with int() or float(). Either expression works and should be picked based on your use case.

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From: xpath(
		xml(outputs('Compose_-_xml_advanced')),
    '/Employees/EmployeeProfile'
)
Map Left: Salary
Map Right: float(xpath(item(),'string(/EmployeeProfile/Salary)'))

For the currency:

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From: xpath(
		xml(outputs('Compose_-_xml_advanced')),
    '/Employees/EmployeeProfile'
)
Map Left: Currency
Map Right: xpath(item(),'string(/EmployeeProfile/Salary/@currency)')

In Power Automate it looks like this:

The raw outputs of the select action show this result:

Further examples

Summing up an array of numbers

In this example I wanted to sum up all the meeting durations for one day from my outlook calendar. I used a select action to return the duration in hours, then a compose action to transform into a json array. Then that array gets transformed using xpath where the numbers are summed up.

//Select action
div(
    float(
      sub(
        ticks(item()?['end']),ticks(item()?['start'])
      )
    ),36000000000
)

//Compose action 1
{
  "root": {
    "Numbers": body('Select')
  }
}

//Compose action 2 - result is the summed numbers
xpath(xml(outputs('Compose_-_1')), 'sum(/root/Numbers)')

Changelog

❤️ Thanks for reading.