topic Re: Debugging Advanced XML in Dashboards & Visualizations

Debugging Advanced XML

nowplaying — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:31:15 GMT

I'm building my first Advanced XML dashboard and need some guidance.

I'm using Notepad++ to build my dashboard and then copying it into a new view. But when I try to save the view I get this error at the top of the page: Encountered the following error while trying to update: In handler 'views': Not valid XML:

Not really helpful for debugging since it doesn't tell me where the syntax error is in my xml.

I looked in /opt/splunk/var/log/splunk but don't see anything that's logging my error.

Just wondering how to troubleshoot my error and best practices for building advanced XML dashboards.

Thanks

Re: Debugging Advanced XML

sideview — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:52:57 GMT

The best advice I can give is to spend some time keeping your indentation clean.

I believe Notepad++ has a preview mode where you can preview the file in a local browser, and the browser will tell you what tags didnt match, and it's much faster than using Splunk itself to check for well-formedness.

And if you're on a linux or unix system, tidy can be a very useful tool:

tidy -i -m -xml my_view.xml

tidy -i -xml my_view.xml -f cleaned_up_version.xml

If your XML is already valid, those will go through and clean up and normalize all your indentation for you. And I think if you do have typos or missing closing tags, tidy can tell you what and where they are.

Re: Debugging Advanced XML

bwooden — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 11:40:00 GMT

Nick's thoughts are excellent. I've also used the XML Validator at w3schools when on a vanilla Windows® box.