Importing An Xml Document Into A Rails Database?

I've been reading through tutorial after tutorial, but nothing seems to be working out for me. The goal is to take a XML document with elements and attributes and insert the data i

Solution 1:

I did something similar using the Nokogiri library.

doc = Nokogiri::XML(xml_data)

doc.css('book').each do|node|
  children = node.children

  Book.create(
    :isbn => node['ISBN'],
    :title => children.css('title').inner_text,
    :description => children.css('description').inner_text,
    :author => children.css('author').inner_text
  )
end

Update

You could create a quick test by doing this:

First install the nokogiri gem:

gem install nokogiri

Then create a file called text_xml.rb with the contents:

require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::XML('<?xml version="1.0"?><library><NAME><![CDATA[Favorite Books]]></NAME><bookISBN="11342343"><title>To Kill A Mockingbird</title><description><![CDATA[Description#1]]></description><author>Harper Lee</author></book><bookISBN="989894781234"><title>Catcher in the Rye</title><description><![CDATA[This is an extremely intense description.]]></description><author>J. D. Salinger</author></book><bookISBN="123456789"><title>Murphy\'s Gambit</title><description><![CDATA[Daughter finds her dad!]]></description><author>Syne Mitchell</author></book></library>')

doc.css('book').each do |node|
  children = node.children

  book = {
    "isbn" => node['ISBN'], 
    "title" => children.css('title').inner_text, 
    "description" => children.css('description').inner_text, 
    "author" => children.css('author').inner_text
  }

  puts book
end

And finally run:

ruby test_xml.rb

I suspect you weren't escaping the single quote in Murphy's Gambit when you pasted in your xml.