Different Output Options for MII Actions

This blog post intends to explain some recent additions to MII in order to help MII developers improve efficiency in their implementations.  These additions were made to the MII query actions, and the HTTP Post action block.  Their intent was to provide ways to get results from these actions without XML overhead, as converting large result documents into XML objects can affect performance.

The HTTP Post action now has a ConvertToXML input property, with a default value of true.  When this is true, the response document of the HTTP post is converted to XML and available from the ReturnAsXML property.  When false, the ReturnAsXML property is blank.  You can set the ConvertToXML property to false for scenarios where you can check for errors by checking the HTTP status code or status text.  Of course this depends on your implementation. This property was delivered as part of note 2355285.

The query actions now accept a Format input property, with a default of text/xml.  If you change the format to another format Illuminator accepts, such as text/csv or text/json, then that builder will be used instead and the results will be in the ResultsAsString property.  This can also be used to get JSON formatted results, without the need for an extra xacute query wrapped call.  You can find more details on this with note 2530562.

I hope these improvements will help the performance of your applications.  Let me know in the comments if there are questions.

Mike