Microsoft Flow – HTTP – calling webservices, XML vs JSON

Last week I was asked about making a webservice work in Microsoft Flow. We were using the floatrates url to get some XML back with exchange rates.

So I used the following url: http://www.floatrates.com/daily/gbp.xml

This all worked really well and I got quite quickly some XML back but then the trouble started.

I used XPath to get the bit of XML that I was interested in.

[code lang=text]
xpath(xml(body(‘HTTP’),’/channel/items/title’)
[/code]

At first I thought that I got the right data back as I got the right number of items back in my Initialize variable action:

The right number of items yes, but no usable data.  The $content doesn’t look usable anyway.

Then  I tried the json equivalent version of the service and as soon as I started running my flow I know got some json returned by my HTTP action in Flow. So I now started using http://www.floatrates.com/daily/gbp.json instead:

Now all I had to do was use the following Expression:

and I got my exchange rate back. When using Flow it is a lot easier to use the more modern JSON and XML seems to not be handled properly. SO if you have the choice I would recommend JSON.