#happy2022workday day-093

Happy 2022 day-093! Today’s 4/4 prep…

Got Boomerang?
Got RaaS?
Got XML?
Get all these and more during the 4/4 Boomerang Share-a-thon on Monday (9am – 12:30pm PDT).

The past several days introduced many boomerang related topics, but not yet XPath. Think of XPath as the way to specify the path into XML data for the XSLT to transform.

The bad news for functional readers so far is that’s a lot of Xs mentioned above, and many of you are new to XML (and XSLT).

The good news is that Workday Studio continues to help us, because there is an XPath Explorer built-in (thank you Eclipse!)

Today’s picture shows RaaS XML with XPath for the Hire_Date field.

Q: Why is XPath important to XML and XSLT?
A: That’s like asking why is it important to be able to find files on a computer. Just as there are many files nested inside of folders on a computer, the output of RaaS reports have several rows of data and unique names for the data fields.

Let’s compare XPath and XSLT with Filters on Reports:
– When you are designing a report inside of Workday, the Filter can control which rows appear in your report output.
– When you are translating the XML that comes out of a RaaS report, XPath is used in your XSLT to specify the data to be transformed.

More on XPath and XSLT in the first two Boomerang Beginner sessions Monday starting at 9am PDT.