Build a Table from XML Data

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Often your application will pull data from a database or an XML file and store it in the form of rows and columns. You can easily insert this data into your document as a new table and quickly apply formatting to the whole table.

Using Aspose.Words, you can easily retrieve data from a data source and store it as a table:

  1. Create a new DocumentBuilder object on your Document.
  2. Start a new table using DocumentBuilder.
  3. If we want to insert the names of each of the columns from our data source as a header row then iterate through each column name and write it into a row in the table.
  4. Iterate through each data row:
    1. Iterate through each item in the row.
    2. Insert the item into the document using DocumentBuilder. The method used depends on the type of the item being inserted e.g DocumentBuilder.writeln for text and DocumentBuilder.insert_image for a byte array which represents an image.
    3. At the end of processing of the row also end the row being created by the DocumentBuilder by using DocumentBuilder.end_row.
  5. Once all rows from the data source have been processed finish the table by calling DocumentBuilder.end_table.
  6. Finally we can set the desired table style using one of the appropriate table properties such as Table.style_identifier to automatically apply formatting to the entire table.

Python has no DataTable equivalent, so the read_xml_table method uses the standard library to read an XML file into a list of column names and a list of row values.

The import_table_from_data method accepts a DocumentBuilder object, the column names and rows containing the data, and a flag which specifies if the column headings are included at the top of the table. This method builds a table from these parameters using the builder’s current position and formatting.

The following code example shows how to execute the above algorithm in Aspose.Words:

The method can then be easily called using your DocumentBuilder and data.

The following code example shows how to import the data and insert it into a new table in the document:

Split Table in Python