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Introduction to XML Virtual Documents

InterSystems IRIS® data platform provides support for XML documents as virtual documents. A virtual document is a kind of message that InterSystems IRIS parses only partially. This kind of message has the standard production message header and the standard message properties such as ID, Priority, and SessionId. The data in the message, however, is not available as message properties; instead it is stored directly in an internal-use global, for greater processing speed.

InterSystems IRIS provides tools so that you can access values in virtual documents, for use in data transformations, business rules, and searching and filtering messages. For background information, see Using Virtual Documents in Productions.

In some cases, it may be more efficient to use XML-enabled objects in productions instead of XML virtual documents. See XML-Enabled Objects Compared to XML Virtual Documents. Specifically, you can treat the XML documents as standard production messages. To do so, you generate XML-enabled classes from the corresponding XML schema and then define message classes that inherit from those XML-enabled classes.

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