The XML Adapter provides standards-based access to XML by modeling local and remote data as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. CData has its own configuration language called API Script that you can use to mark up schemas. API Script hides the complexity of crafting requests to XML and parsing the feeds returned.

However, API Script is also a high-level programming language that enables you to control almost every aspect of data access and processing. Your schema is a script interpreted by the API Script engine.

You use keywords, attributes, items, operations, and feeds to write scripts:

• Attribute: The name part of a name-value pair, as in attribute="address", value="123 Pleasant Lane".
• Item: A related group of attribute-value pairs that describe an input or output. For example:
  

  Attribute="name" value="Bob"
  Attribute="address" value="123 Pleasant Lane"
  Attribute="phone" value="123-4567"

• Feed: A list of items: for example, a list of customers with their addresses and phone numbers.
• Operation: A generic name for methods that accept items as input and produce feeds as output.
• Keyword: An API Script statement, like api:set.

• Project columns over a feed and split feed items into rows.
• Use high-level programming constructs such as if/else statements and case statements to control execution flow.
• Call operations and define your own.
• Create and modify items, the inputs to an operation, and feeds, the operation's result.
• Process the feed resulting from an operation call by iterating through its items.