Dealing with empty values in xml using FME XML Templater?

Question

​I am converting excel to xml using FME 2016 and the XML Templater.

When a field is empty, my xml is invalid because my schema requires

<TAGNAME xsi:nil="true" /> 

but instead gets

<TAGNAME />

which doesn't validate against empty values. Does anyone know how FME can resolve this?

Answer 1

If you were writing with the plain XML writer, had a schema set up with Nillable="True", and had attributes that were 'null' in FME, then you would get that automatically.

Because you're using the XMLTemplater you'll have to delve into XQuery - to be specific our developers told me to use "XQuery quote". You'd need to test if the attribute is empty and write either the value or a fixed string of xsi:nil="true" depending on that test.