E4X Migration guide

The E4X extension for the native support of XML in JavaScript are progressively abandonned by Mozilla. Adobe Campaign heavily used this extension and so it is preparing to migrate to an alternative solution.

The aim of this guide is to help you migrate existing configurations or develop new configurations by describing the replacement solutions.

The old and new system co-exist, the currenct version of Adobe Campaign is always compatible with E4X but new configurations must not be developped with the E4X extension.

Reminder: E4X adds a type of JavaScript xml that can be built directly from the source program:

var doc = <xml> ... </xml>

or from a string:

var doc = new XML ("<xml>...</xml>")

It can then be manipulated with a specific API:

element.@id
element.where

The native "xml" type is replaced by a DOM API, these are DOMDocument , DOMElement , DOMNode types, ... the following is the equivalent of the most common operations:

anElement.@id

anElement.$id

anElement.@["recipient-id"]

anElement["$recipient-id"]

anElement.childElement

anElement.getElements("childElement")

anElement.getFirstElement("childElement")

XML documents in a JavaScript must be replaced. When this document is to be used for a native function or an SOAP call passing an XML document in parameter, you can pass a JXON directly. This will be automatically transformed into an XML document (DOMDocument). If not, you can always pass via a JXON object, but an explicit conversion using the DOMDocument.fromJXON function is required.

var doc = DOMDocument.fromJXON({queryDef: 
{schema: "xtk:workflow", operation: "select",
  select: { node: {expr: "@internalName"} } 
}
})

Example of equivalence between XML and JXON syntax:

              <queryDef schema="nms:delivery" operation="get">
  <select>
    <node expr="@created"/>
    <node expr="@lastModified"/>
  </select>
  <where>
    <condition expr="@id=123456"/>
  </where>
</queryDef>

              {queryDef: {schema: "nms:delivery", operation: "get", 
  select: {
    node: [
      {expr: "@created"}, 
      {expr: "@lastModified"}]
    }, 
  where: {
    condition: {expr: "@id=123456"}
  }
}}

For more information about JXON syntax, refer to the Using XML page.

These SOAP methods must run NLWS object properties. The schema's JavaScript ID is created from the namespace and the name starting with a capital. For example, the nms:delivery schema will have nmsDelivery as its JS ID.

nms.delivery.Play(deliveryId);

NLWS.nmsDelivery.Play(deliveryId);

To receive an XML document whose parameters are in the DOM format rather than E4X format, the dom="true" attribute must be added into the schema.

Using XML to build multiline strings must be replaced by a concatenation of strings by forgetting to add the end of the \n line.

<str>line 1
line 2
line 3
</str>.toString()

"line 1\n" +
"line 2\n" +
"line 3\n"

It is necessary to activate the DOM option on the publication template or from the JavaScript template during the preview. For an XSL transformation with JavaScript pre-processing, you must also activate the DOM option (aggregator window).

function isDOM()
{
  return true
}