Why cdata

Isn't anything I write in XML tags some sort of data? A CDATA section is " a section of element content that is marked for the parser to interpret as only character data, not markup. Try saving the following as a. One big use-case: your xml includes a program, as data e. As paary mentioned, other common uses include when you're embedding URLs that contain ampersands.

And as a explanation for why this example uses CData and not the appropriate pubData and dc:creator tags : this is for website display using a RSS widget for which we have no real formatting control. This enables us to specify the height and position of the included image, format the author names and date correctly, and so forth, without the need for a new widget.

It also means I can script this and not have to add them by hand. You can use this to escape some characters which otherwise will be treated as regular XML. The data inside this will not be parsed. Otherwise, you will get an error as it will be parsed as regular XML. It's used to contain data which could otherwise be seen as xml because it contains certain characters. The Cdata is a data which you may want to pass to an xml parser and still not interpreted as an xml.

Such open fields can have any data which does not strictly fall under basic data type or xml defined custom data types. Like -- Is this a correct tag for xml comment? Here Cdata comes to your rescue. By declaring as Cdata you are telling the parser don't treat the data wrapped as an xml though it may look like one.

So, the above line is written as two parts as follows. There are few possibilities in losing the contents. Last point is size of the section that is important while transferring XML file with large amount of information.

All the statistical manipulation is performed. It has many business impacts when the tags are used improperly, but has good performance when utilized properly. The overall summary is while using CDATA to embed mark-up in XML document benefits us from having to encode the data, care should be taken with the effect of the client-server communication. The schema of the message defines only the XML string as a string, not its complex content.

Sure, it wouldn't be compliant with the original schema, but it would make transfers and assertions much easier. Well, once again, event handlers in ReadyAPI can do this for us:. For example, you can now see nicer formatting in the Overview view:. Also, it allows you to create property transfers and assertions right in the Outline view as usual:.

Of course, this approach has some severe limitations: it depends on the response formatting, and Schema Compliance assertions will probably fail, but it might be what you need to get the job done. Find out what our Pro version of SoapUI can do to improve your testing. Carlos Delgado Author. Add Your Comment. Become a more social person. Related Articles. What does "use strict;" means in Javascript May 12, 6.