Remove node if item is null

[andrepaulo-bit]

Hello, I was wondering if it's possible to remove a node if the value its null.

I had a look at suppressEmptyNode but it doesn't seem like it solves my issue.
Saw this issue: #123
And that would work as well, but there are a few values that can be null, and I'm not sure how I can do that for every value.

[amitguptagwl]

Can you please explain with example?

[andrepaulo-bit]

Sure, for a webservice that I'm using, it accepts some fields as null, and whenever I send the node empty it claims there was a problem parsing the number.
So if I have this:

{
    "requiredNumber": 4,
    "requiredString": "test",
    "optionalNumber": null,
}

It gets converted to this:
<requiredNumber>4</requiredNumber><requiredString>test</requiredString><optionalNumber/>

But the webservice will complain that it can't parse optionalNumber.
If I add xsi:nil="true" to the field it will work, but if I just remove it from the XML it will also accept it.

<requiredNumber>4</requiredNumber><requiredString>test</requiredString>

So this would also be allowed on the webservice side.

I was hoping there was a easy way to filter out the empty tags to avoid going into each one and if its null add the xsi:nil="true"

[amitguptagwl]

hmm, got your point. So you're basically looking for a feature where you can decide when a tag should not be skipped.

[andrepaulo-bit]

yeah basically.
I tried doing what was in #123 but had a few problems, and considering that was almost 4 years ago went for a simpler option, with regex replace <optionalNumber/> and other optional parameters that I might have. Seems to do the trick for me.

[luiscarlosjayk]

I had same problem and what ended doing was running using RegExp to solve it:

function removeEmptyNodesFromXML(xmlString) {
    const emptyNodesPattern = new RegExp(/(<[\w]+><[\w]+\/><\/[\w]+>)|(<[\w]+\/>)/gi);
    const cleanedXmlString = xmlString.replace(emptyNodesPattern, '');

    return cleanedXmlString;
}

This will remove any <tag/> with <[\w]+\/> and also it's parent if it's the only children node <parent><node/></parent> with <[\w]+><[\w]+\/><\/[\w]+>, they have a pipe so it makes an or.
That solved my case, however, if you need deeper/more nested traversal this won't work.