xml2relational {xml2relational}

Package 'xml2relational'

Description

Transforming a hierarchical XML document into a relational data model.

What is xml2relational

The xml2relational package is designed to 'flatten' XML documents with nested objects into relational dataframes. xml2relational takes an XML file as input and converts it into a set of dataframes (tables). The tables are linked among each other with foreign keys and can be exported as CSV or ready-to-use SQL code (CREATE TABLE for the data model, INSERT INTO for the data).

How to use xml2relational

• First, use toRelational() to read in an XML file and to convert into a relational data model.

• This will give you a list of dataframes, one for each table in the relational data model. Tables are linked by foreign keys. You can specify the naming convention for the tables' primary and foreign keys as arguments in toRelational().

• You can now export the data structures of the tables (or a selection of tables) using getCreateSQL(). It support multiple SQL dialects, and you also provide syntax and data type information for additional SQL dialects.

• You can also export the data as SQL INSERT statements with the getInsertSQL(). If you only want to export the data as CSV use savetofiles() to save the dataframes produced by toRelational() as comma-separated files.