In this article I will explain with an example, how to read, parse and insert XML String data to SQL Server Table using Stored Procedure.
SQL Server 2005 and above versions, allow to pass a parameter of XML data type to the Stored Procedure and provide functions to parse the XML and extract its Attribute and Tag values.
 
 
Database
I have created a simple table named CustomerDetails whose schema is shown below.
Read, Parse and Insert XML String into SQL Table using Stored Procedure
 
Note: The SQL for creating the database is provided in the attached sample code.
 
 
The XML File
The following XML file (Customers.xml) contains the records of Customers. The data is stored as attribute within the tags. This XML will be passed as String to the Stored Procedure.
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Customers>
 <Customer Id ="1">
    <Name>John Hammond</Name>
    <Country>United States</Country>
 </Customer>
 <Customer Id = "2">
    <Name>Mudassar Khan</Name>
    <Country>India</Country>
 </Customer>
    <Customer Id ="3">
    <Name>Suzanne Mathews</Name>
    <Country>France</Country>
 </Customer>
    <Customer Id ="4">
    <Name>Robert Schidner</Name>
    <Country>Russia</Country>
 </Customer>
</Customers>
 
 
Stored Procedure for reading, parsing and inserting XML data
The below stored procedure is accepting a parameter of type XML (which would be passed from the code behind). This XML object is parsed and the Attribute and Tag values are fetched and inserted into the Table.
The nodes function of the XML data type is uses XQuery expression to pull out the XML nodes from the XML, for this case I need to fetch the Customer nodes and hence the expression is i.e. /Customers/Customer where Customers is the Root Node and Customer is the child node.
Once the nodes are fetched we need to extract the attribute and tag Inner Text values. For fetching the Inner Text values between the Tags we need to make use of the values function.
The values function can read the Attribute as well as the Inner Text.
 
Attribute
In order to read the attribute we need to pass the name of the Attribute prefix with @ and its data type, in this example the attribute Id is fetched using Customer.value('@Id', 'INT').
 
Inner Text
In order to fetch the inner text we need to pass the name of the Tag and its data type. The Inner Text of the XML tag is fetched using text function and we also make use of an index [1] which means it should fetch only the first matched value.
Finally the values are inserted into the CustomerDetails table.
CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[InsertXML]
@xml XML
AS
BEGIN
      SET NOCOUNT ON;
 
      INSERT INTO CustomerDetails
      SELECT
      Customer.value('@Id','INT') AS Id, --ATTRIBUTE
      Customer.value('(Name/text())[1]','VARCHAR(100)') AS Name, --TAG
      Customer.value('(Country/text())[1]','VARCHAR(100)') AS Country --TAG
      FROM
      @xml.nodes('/Customers/Customer')AS TEMPTABLE(Customer)
END
 
 
Executing the Stored Procedure
The Stored Procedure is executed using the EXEC command as shown below.
EXEC [InsertXML]'<Customers>
                               <Customer Id ="1">
                                    <Name>John Hammond</Name>
                                    <Country>United States</Country>
                               </Customer>
                               <Customer Id = "2">
                                    <Name>Mudassar Khan</Name>
                                    <Country>India</Country>
                               </Customer>
                               <Customer Id ="3">
                                    <Name>Suzanne Mathews</Name>
                                    <Country>France</Country>
                               </Customer>
                               <Customer Id ="4">
                                    <Name>Robert Schidner</Name>
                                    <Country>Russia</Country>
                               </Customer>
                              </Customers>'
SELECT * FROM CustomerDetails
 
 
Screenshot
Read, Parse and Insert XML String into SQL Table using Stored Procedure
 
 
Downloads
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