infos = Information about the xerces plugin is in keys below
infos/author = Armin Wurzinger e1528.nosp@m.532@.nosp@m.libel.nosp@m.ektr.nosp@m.a.org
infos/licence = BSD
infos/provides = storage/xml
infos/needs =
infos/placements = getstorage setstorage
infos/status = recommended maintained unittest memleak
infos/metadata = xerces/rootname
infos/description = Storage in the XML format.

This plugin is a storage plugin allowing Elektra to read and write XML formatted files. It uses a general format which:

Maps key names to XML elements
Maps key values to textual content of XML elements
Maps metakeys to XML attributes. Metakey name = attribute name, Metakey value = attribute value
Ignores XML comments

See installation. The package is called libelektra5-xerces.

To include this plugin in a homebrew installation run brew tap elektrainitiative/elektra followed by brew install elektrainitiative/elektra/elektra --with-xerces

To mount an XML file we use:

kdb mount file.xml user:/test/file xerces

The strength and usage of this plugin is that it supports arbitrary XML files and does not require a specific format. Given the following example of an XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
<xerces>foo
  <bar meta="da_ta">bar</bar>
</xerces>

Please note that if the key name does not correspond to the root element of the xml file, the original name gets stored in a metakey called xerces/rootname. The content of the root element gets mapped to the mount point.

We can observe the following result after mounting:

kdb get user:/test/file
#> foo
kdb get user:/test/file/bar
#> bar
kdb meta-get user:/test/file/bar meta
#> da_ta

To export an existing keyset to the XML format:

kdb export user:/test/xerces xerces > example.xml

The root element of the resulting XML file will be "xerces" again, restored via the metadata. If you don't want this behavior, delete the metadata xerces/rootname on the mount point, then it uses the mount point's name instead.

Xerces-C++ 3.0.0 or newer (apt-get install libxerces-c-dev or brew install xerces-c on macOS)
CMake 3.6 or a copy of FindXercesC.cmake in /usr/share/cmake-3.0/Modules/

This plugin is not able to handle key names which contain characters that are not allowed to appear as an XML element name. Consider using the rename plugin to take care about proper escaping.

The main rules of an XML element name are:

Element names must start with a letter or underscore
Element names cannot start with the letters xml (or XML, or Xml, etc.)
Element names can contain letters, digits, hyphens, underscores, and periods
Element names cannot contain spaces

The root key is not allowed to be an array, as this would correspond to multiple root elements in XML (see the GitHub issue).

XSD transformations, schemas or DTDs are not supported yet.

# Backup-and-Restore:user:/tests/xercesfile
sudo kdb mount xerces.xml user:/tests/xercesfile xerces
kdb set user:/tests/xercesfile foo
kdb meta-set user:/tests/xercesfile xerces/rootname xerces
kdb set user:/tests/xercesfile/bar bar
kdb meta-set user:/tests/xercesfile/bar meta "da_ta"
kdb meta-get user:/tests/xercesfile xerces/rootname
#> xerces
kdb get user:/tests/xercesfile/bar
#> bar
kdb export user:/tests/xercesfile xerces
# STDOUT-REGEX: <bar meta="da_ta">bar</bar>
sudo kdb rm -r user:/tests/xercesfile
sudo kdb umount user:/tests/xercesfile