I have a large number of custom fixlets that are essentially the same, with the only differences being the name and version of a product. So, rather than create all of these things in the BDE individually, I thought I would create the XML file and just import the things and call it a day.
I have searched high and low for how to construct the XML for importing it, but I cannot find any references.
I decided to export several existing fixlets and I created my XML based on that output. But it croaked when I tried to input it. The error message I got was:
File ‘import.bde’ failed to parse for the following reason:
Expected an element name
OK
Can somone point me to the proper way (or documentation or examples) of how to construct the XML for importing to BDE?
So I’ve figured out WHY I’m getting the error I’m getting, but I don’t know the resolution.
One of my fixlets checks the RPM version, so the line looks like this:
version of package “foo” of rpm < "
The import wizard appears to be keying in on the "<“2”. That would explain the “Expected an element name” error message.
So how do I import XML files that have legitimate characters in the relevance (no, I cannot substitute ‘%0c’ for the ‘<’ character, nor can I prefix it with a ‘’)???
Oh, and to answer the rest of the question about the XML formatting, all you need to do is export an existing fixlet to see what it needs to look at. It was pretty easy to decipher what needed to be changed in order to get things imported properly.
Glad you got it to work… When you do an XML export from the BES Console, it will XML encode and XML escape the contents of the Fixlets.
If you change the relevance by hand or you use a programmatic technique to generate the XML, you will want to escape the relevance, action, description, and any other fields you need.
Here are things to look out for (standard XML escaping):