XML/XSD Parser

This Flask app with an easy-to-use frontend is intended for generating a configuration excel, given an input XML/XSD file (Extensible Markup format to Relational schema).

This module was used as a proof-of-concept for an internal use-case.

Overview

1. This Flask Application is live on Heroku for demonstration purposes.
2. After logging in, one must upload an XML/XSD File, select a file-format, a destination data delimiter (default: comma), and a filename for the final config file (default: original filename with timestamp).
3. The hierarchy of parsed XML/XSD selectable tags is displayed and one needs to choose a section of these tag(s), and define the Primary key tag, Primary child tag, and Primary parent tag.
4. The config file will mainly contain a hierarchy of nested-tags of your XML/XSD file (with associated metadata for the downstream Pyspark application) as:
   • Parent1
   • Parent1.child1
   • Parent1.child2
   • Parent1.child2.subchild1
   • Parent1.child2.subchild2
5. Finally, the config excel file for the parsed XML/XSD Tags is created at server side, so that the Spark-Scala code can access and read the XML files from Unix directory.

Step-by-step guide to setup the XML/XSD Parser

1. Install GIT (This repository used 2.25.1 on Windows10): Git

2. Install Python (This application was built on 3.8.1): Python

3. Clone the current repository: XML/XSD to CSV

4. Navigate to the directory for this repo, and create a virtual environment for making a copy of your system-wide Python interpreter:

> python -m venv myvirtualenv

5. Activate this virtual environment. You need not perform step#4 each time for execution:

> myvirtualenv\Scripts\activate

6. Install the application by executing:

> pip install -e .

7. Set the starting point for running this Flask application as the package where our application 'xml_to_csv' lives:

> set flask_app=xml_to_csv
> set flask_env=development

8. Execute the application from any directory on your system:

> flask run

9. In a web-browser, navigate to the URL mentioned in the cmd output from above command. For example http://127.0.0.1:5000/ or http://localhost:5000/. App is currently live on Heroku to view.

10. Currently the application accepts (username, password) from the excel file Login_creds.xlsx for logging in. This file is located in the /xml_to_csv/static/ folder of the application. These static login-credentials were used for quick development of a Minimal Viable Product.