XML-to-BDL conversion options

By default, XML-to-BDL deserialization raises an error when the XML document contains attributes or elements that are not defined in the BDL variable receiving the data.

To relax the conversion rules, you can set the xml_ignoreunknownattributes and xml_ignoreunknownelements options on the xml.Serializer class. These options instruct the serializer to ignore unexpected XML attributes or elements during deserialization. For a detailed list of option flags, refer to Serialization option flags.

For example, consider the following BDL record:

DEFINE data RECORD ATTRIBUTES(XMLName="Demo"),
val1 INTEGER ATTRIBUTES(XMLName="Value1"),
val2 STRING  ATTRIBUTES(XMLName="Value2"),
attr INTEGER ATTRIBUTES(XMLAttribute, XMLName="MyAttr")
END RECORD

The next XML fragment contains an undefined attribute and an unexpected element. Without relaxed options, these will cause a conversion error.

<Demo MyAttr="hello" badAttr="BAD">
<Value1>128</Value1>
<Unexpected1>Will be ignored</Unexpected1>
<Value2>Hello</Value2>
</Demo>

To allow the document to load without errors, configure the options as follows:

xml_ignoreunknownattributes = TRUE
xml_ignoreunknownelements  = TRUE
#...
xml.Serializer.DomToVariable(doc, data)

These options cannot relax all structural incompatibilities. In complex cases, the conversion may still fail when the XML structure does not match the expected BDL definition.

For details on setting options programmatically, see xml.Serializer.SetOption.