Storing XML response from webservice into Rails model - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am working on a custom portal to VMware vCenter through the VMware Orchestrator API. I am using savon to query the SOAP API (WSDL) of Orchestrator and have that returning valid data... specifically an XML containing all the Virtual Machines.
What is the best/easiest way to capture the response into a Rails Model? The XML structure of the response is below...
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<soapenv:Body>
<findResponse xmlns="http://webservice.vso.dunes.ch">
<findReturn>
<totalCount>4</totalCount>
<elements>
<item>
<type>VC:VirtualMachine</type>
<id>vc.demo.local/vm-37</id>
<properties>
<item>
<name>displayName</name>
<value>FreeNAS</value>
</item>
<item>
<name>isTemplate</name>
<value>false</value>
</item>
<item>
<name>name</name>
<value>FreeNAS</value>
</item>
<item>
<name>connectionState</name>
<value>connected</value>
</item>
<item>
<name>state</name>
<value>poweredOff</value>
</item>
<item>
<name>vimHost</name>
<value>https://vc.demo.local:443/sdk</value>
</item>
<item>
<name>id</name>
<value>vm-37</value>
</item>
<item>
<name>dunesId</name>
<value>vc.demo.local/vm-37</value>
</item>
</properties>
<dunesUri>dunes://service.dunes.ch/CustomSDKObject?id='vc.demo.local/vm-37'&dunesName='VC:VirtualMachine'</dunesUri>
</item>
<item>
...
</item>
</elements>
</findReturn>
</findResponse>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

Answer 1

You could pick out the few key attributes that you may want to query for (name, id, type) and then just store the rest of the XML as a clob or varchar or as a native XML type if your db supports it. Them you can read other values out in code when you need to.

Answer 2

I use the nokogiri gem to parse xml. With nokogiri you can call an xpath to get all elements with a certain parent tag. For example using your xml:
your_Model = Your_Model.new
docs = Nokogiri::XML(your.xml)
your_Model = docs.xpath('//item').map do |i|
{
#here you would need to map the objects of the xml to your model attributes so if your attributes were called, itemname, and itemvalue the code would be.
itemname => i.xpath('name').inner_text,
itemvalue => i.xpath('value').inner_text
}
your_Model.save!
Make sure you require the Nokogiri gem if you decide to go this route.
Hope it helps